Talk:List of World War II flying aces

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Aviation: Biography

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Military history: Aviation / Biography / World War II

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The article Ernst Scheufele was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 16 December 2020 with a consensus to merge the content into List of World War II flying aces. If you find that such action has not been taken promptly, please consider assisting in the merger instead of re-nominating the article for deletion. To discuss the merger, please use this talk page.

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Nationality[edit]

Given that an Icelandic ace is listed as from Iceland and a Swedish one as from Sweden shouldn't Finucane be listed as from the then Irish Free State? Jjc2002 (talk) 21:55, 8 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Break of the is list is very, very bad. Nobody can see anymore, that the best American in the list sit on Number 401. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2003:EF:2F17:DB00:A038:E95E:F1F6:25F5 (talk) 08:07, 21 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Article is hard to use without list[edit]

This page used to be a great resource and is now much harder to use. I'd like to propose bringing back the list which, though long, was still much more usable than the current version - especially for cross country comparisons. HugeUranium (talk) 16:18, 10 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Please bring it back. 78.80.115.226 (talk) 06:33, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Restored the long-standing, sourced list. Can't conceive a good reason to remove it. This is a list - it's going to be long. And one can easily have the template list the people by country or any other criterion. -- Director (talk) 12:38, 18 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The breakdown of this list into different sections was discussed at Talk:List of World War II flying aces/Archive_1#Size: Should this list be all inclusive?. I will reinstate to the agreed format since the size of the article is not manageable. Obviously, if the consensus has changed again we can always fall back. See also WP:AS and WP:SPLITLIST. Cheers MisterBee1966 (talk) 08:42, 20 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously it would be ideal to have the list in its entirety but being so large, but also incomplete, I found it was very hard to edit and maintain. It was on this basis I supported the breakdown of the list into more manageable sections to facilitate ease of editing. It seems to me that the majority, if not all, of the complaints are actually from IPs/editors who weren't involved in the maintenance of the original list. I note that the new list arrangement mimics the approach taken for the lists for the WWI aces, has there been any complaints about those? Zawed (talk) 09:52, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The WWI lists in parts is already a featured list, the breakdown of the list was discussed during the featured list review, see Wikipedia:Featured list candidates/List of World War I aces credited with more than 20 victories/archive1. Cheers MisterBee1966 (talk) 19:18, 23 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I think a better balance needs to be struck between including all aces and page usability. The page is called "List of World War II flying aces" but in its current form the title should be changed to "List of lists of.." as the page does not actually contain a list. This is confusing. I had this page bookmarked as a reference for a research project and it's missing the information I cited.

I propose keeping the current list of lists, but including a subset of the original list on the page. Perhaps aces with more than 20 kills and at least from from every country. HugeUranium (talk) 07:03, 4 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the current format is hard to use, maybe even completely useless. Here's a specific example of a major shortcoming:

Let's suppose somebody wants to find out who the highest-scoring RAF ace was. That person is Marmaduke Pattle, but with the current format, there's no realistic chance to learn that: Pattle does not even appear on the UK aces sublist, because he was born in South Africa (even though he very specifically flew with the RAF, and NOT with the South African Air Force). The current arrangement is not only hard to use, it's actively misleading for people who want to learn new things they don't already know.

Or, for another example, let's say somebody wants to know who the five top-ranking German aces were. Well, you can't do it. The German aces subpage has TWENTY-FIVE separate sub-sublists, one for pilots whose name starts with "A", one for pilots whose name starts with "B", etc.. You would have to combine the top portions of each of the 25 lists with pen on paper just to get a list of top 5 German aces regardless of name starting letter. And the separate "pilots with over 100 claims" list doesn't help you, either, because it doesn't record actual kill numbers.

I'm not a Wikipedia editor, so I can't speak to editing principles. I am, however, a user who used to refer to this page semi-regularly due to my work, and I have to say that however cumbersome the old giant list was, at least it could be used to look up specific data. In contrast, this new format is completely worthless, and I earnestly hope the old format will be restored soon. 89.134.4.25 (talk) 18:53, 6 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]