War Diaries Talk

Why shouldn’t I classify a page as a “diary page” so that I open up a wider range of tags?

  • MatthewIWM by MatthewIWM moderator

    There are two reasons for making sure that you classify a page accurately and don’t try to ‘cheat the system’! We have carefully chosen the tags you need based on the type of page it is and the information we are capturing for those pages. If you deliberately classify it as a different page type your classification won’t match any others submitted and won’t be counted. And then any tags that you have included will also be discarded. So there is no benefit to doing this.

    Posted

  • Curt_Carpenter by Curt_Carpenter

    My current diary (Royal Scots Greys) makes extensive use of appendices -- for example, appendix 45 is a list of casualties incurred by the unit during one month in 1917. I have been treating these as diary pages unless they are clearly of a different type (eg. orders, signal pad). Are you saying that the effort to tag these appendices is an error? If so, please let me know -- it takes a lot of time to tag each name in a long casualty list!

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    Hi Curt

    No I wouldn't treat a casualty list as a diary page. Only the dated pages which record daily events should be classified as such. I would however treat it as a report, which is what I think it is - i.e. a monthly casualty report. This then does open up the person tag so you can tag all those names. Yes this is time-consuming (I have done some myself!) but especially with ORs it may be one of the few times they are actually personally mentioned in the diary so it's very worth while indeed in my opinion.

    What isn't worth while is putting in extra effort to tag place names and grid references and suchlike in pages that aren't really diary pages - i.e. using tags that only appear in the diary page option on pages which aren't diary pages- but then that doesn't sound like what you are doing anyway.

    Hope that clarifies it?

    Heather

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  • Curt_Carpenter by Curt_Carpenter

    Hi Heather

    Thanks, that clarifies things, and I'll follow the "Report" scheme going forward. In any event, I'm more than happy to fill in the Person tags wherever I can and agree fully with your point about the O.R.s.

    Curt

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  • emzi1980 by emzi1980

    Hi

    I have just read the above and have a further question or 2!.

    1. If the casualty list lists them by date and then person, is this a diary or a report?
    2. If an appendix contains unit strength on a particular date e.g. 13 August 1914, is this a diary page and therefore opening up the ability to enter unit strength or is it a report which does not allow for such things to be entered?

    Emma

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  • HeatherC by HeatherC moderator

    If the casualty list is contained within the diary pages - e.g. a list of casualties for 14 September is on the diary page for 14th Sept then it's a diary page. If it's at the end of the month as an Appendix or separate list then it's a report.

    If it's an Appendix then it's not categorised a diary page.

    If you had a particular page that you were asking about then if you give us the link we can give you an opinion on that specific page.

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