Article's Structure is Terrible

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189 sections means that the article is either too long to read, or it needs a rewrite. Ammar M. Elbehery (talk) 16:01, 29 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

92.000 dead during the campaign of 1940 ?

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Not so sure. More Recent research arrives at some ten thousands less* - And, what about the 3rd French Republic Armed Forces POW, died in german captivity from 1940 on ? There were some 40.-50.000 of them. /

Split and merge proposal

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I agree with Ammar M. Elbehery who noted above that the article structure is terrible. I don't have a formal or specific enough idea of what the best structure would be, so this perhaps should be called a "discussion" and not a "proposal", but let me throw some ideas out, and see what happens.

For starters, the article title includes the word "France", but what does that even mean during the period of World War II? Are we talking about the Vichy regime under the Nazi boot, or the Free French Forces under De Gaulle with tentacles in Free French Africa and the Resistance? Combining both Vichy and Free France in one article, and calling it "France" is head-spinning. Those two need to be split off into their own articles, perhaps, Free France military and Military forces of the Vichy regime, or some such, if there's a need for that, or into subsections of existing articles if there isn't. (Note that the latter will be a short article, because they weren't permitted much under the Nazi yoke, but see Armistice Army for a possible destination as a subsection.)

This article attempts to cover a lot of material, that is covered in many articles that already exist, and have more specific titles. In my opinion, this article should be converted to a parent article in WP:Summary style, with the existing articles being the child articles. This would mean stripping it way down, with a paragraph or two for major sections like "Free French Forces", "French State Army" (poorly named; but that's another issue), and "French colonial empire", and almost all the content presently in those sections, moved out and merged into the articles about those topics, leaving a paragraph or two of summary about the subtopic, headed by a ((Main)) link pointing to the existing child article. As it happens, there's another section at the same level as those three, entitled "French Resistance" which is already just a couple of summary paragraphs, with a ((Main)) link to the French Resistance article. So, that section is fine, and is a model for how the rest of the article should be handled. But the Free France and Vichy France sections together, only make up about 1/3 of the article, or less, which leaves a lot of other material to deal with.

The top-level sections "European Theatre of World War II", "Atlantic theatre of World War II", "Mediterranean theatre of World War II", "African theatre of World War II", "Middle East theatre of World War II", "Indian Ocean theatre of World War II", "South-East Asian theatre of World War II", should be merged into their respective theatre of World War II articles, imho, with a brief summary left here for French contributions. In the case of "Middle East" and "Indian Ocean" there's mostly just empty section titles with ((Main)) links; those can be simply eliminated. As far as the section "English Channel and North Sea theatre of World War II" I never heard of that labeled as a "theatre" before, but maybe I"m wrong.

Your feedback on this quasi-proposal would be appreciated. Mathglot (talk) 04:34, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure I agree. France is, by and large, a well-defined territory. With of course the large exception of its overseas departments and territories, but I think of France at the time as a single country, even if at a given point half and more of it was occupied by Germany. Perhaps this is an emotional reaction learned while I lived in France. In any event, I just read the first paragraph and see that the article needs much unFrenching, so I will do a pass for that, and later discuss structure with you, if you are still interested. Elinruby (talk) 08:20, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
(later)Article needs a lot of work. It feels like somebody fished it out of draftspace, where somebody else had set up an outline and pasted some detail from various sources into some of the sections. Haven't really done a first pass, just skimmed and gotten some low-hanging fruit. As you know I have done a lot of French military history and I am finding this article weirdly both very incomplete and overly detailed. I will do a deeper dive and ping you if you haven't responded by the time I have an opinion. But offhand, yes, it should be a parent article while still managing to be accurate, which is also a problem in places. For example, as we well know from Liberation of France, there was a lot more to the Resistance than Charles de Gaulle. Elinruby (talk) 20:32, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Copyeditor notes

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  • I can see Soviet, but German? Not positive this is wrong but find it unlikely. Even conscripts would be fighting on the Western front, no?

Elinruby (talk) 08:33, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • There is a link to this in the German capture section, although the display text is something else. And it is a little more complicated than that. Proximate cause of Case Anton Elinruby (talk) 04:19, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nomenclature and conventions

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Thinking of establishing some conventions:

  • note to self, stuff about forced labor is military history because those were prisoners of war, but that is too much detail for the lede and probably should have its own section any way, perhaps. Definitely further down the body of the article.

Open to suggestions, comments and insults Elinruby (talk) 15:57, 14 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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