Talk:Front (military)

Front line seems to just be an article on the same topic, that needs to be WP:GLOBALIZEed. And sourced. AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 08:47, 24 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

Oppose - Although neither article is very good, the topics are quite distinct. It doesn't help that Front (military) has some bits in it that are about Front Line. Cyclopaedic (talk) 11:12, 24 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

@Cyclopaedic: could you lead me in the right direction in trying to clarify how the two are distinct? Because at the moment, both are unsourced, and seem to describe essentially the same thing. The first sentence of one describes it as "a contested armed frontier between opposing forces", and the other says it's "the closest position(s) of an armed force's personnel and equipment...the forward-most friendly maritime or land forces on the battlefield..." I can't distinguish between the two enough to find sources that definitely refer to one or the other. If anything, I thought maybe one seems to refer to the space between opposing forces, and the other stub seems to just refer to the troops and equipment at that space, but each article goes on to obfuscate that point. AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 23:19, 25 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

It's essentially the difference between "a front" (a technical term in strategy) and "the front" (common language for "front line" or "FEBA"). A front is either the whole contested boundary ( I don't much like "frontier") between two opposing armies, or a strategically-distinct part of it (the Western Front, or the Vosges Front). "The front" just means the actual line or point of contact with the enemy - where the fighting is. Wikipedia is about topics, not defining words, and the two are distinct topics.

The last two bullet points in Front (military), however, seem to refer to "front line" rather than "a front" and should be moved or deleted. Cyclopaedic (talk) 08:49, 27 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

But...A "contested boundary" is the "point of contact with the enemy", right? If it wasn't, the boundary wouldn't be contested. I agree, as you say, that WP should be about topics rather than definitions, but in this case from what I've seen so far, there seems to be more difficulty distinguishing the topics than defining each term. Is it possible that Front line should be deleted as a WP:DICDEF? AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 09:50, 28 October 2014 (UTC)Reply

I'm getting the impression that perhaps "a front" refers to a large scale overview of a contested boundary, whereas "front line" (when not used as an adjective for particular materiel or personnel, e.g. "front line/frontline troops"), or "FEBA" refers to the forces on a particular battlefield/battlespace. If that's true, the question IMO is whether or not the two are actually distinct concepts, or the same concept at different scales. Or more to the point, are they concepts that are distinct enough that they should continue on as two stubs, or should they be combined, expanded, compared/contrasted, and WP:SPLIT once they reach an acceptably complete or at least coherent degree of coverage of their respective topics. AdventurousSquirrel (talk) 10:01, 28 October 2014 (UTC)Reply