Landships II

Haha, I made that specific comment more jokingly and hopingly than seriously.
Anyway, I very much appreciate the feedback! Since we are a team, I cannot really speak on behalf of Tanks Encyclopedia, but I will make some comments on your remarks as a team member.

We are aware that some of our general articles contain outdated and flat-out wrong information. It's because at first, by the founder, the site was never intended as an informational site, but as a platform to test web-related things and publish his illustrations of armored vehicles. Starting roughly from 2017, only then, a team started to emerge that set itself the goal to not only publish the illustrations, but also provide top notch information.

Not too long ago, this conflict of old and new interests led to the elimination of most (not all) old articles from the site. Those are now only accessible on a different part of the site for SEO reasons and not part of our current portfolio. By this move, we hoped that our new articles would be appreciated better, as the incorrect information in the old articles was quite a hindrance to the audience. After all, why would you take an article for correct, even if it's really good, when it is surrounded by other articles full of errors? Some old articles on essential topics were retained, however, but with the 'outdated banner' included.

Now, the composition of our team has some drawbacks. We are all volunteers and thus, we cannot be ordered what to write on or not. In practice this means that most writers have their niche and don't write about much else. Because of this, some fields of armored vehicle history are represented disproportionally on the site, and most general and mainstream stuff is less written about. To give my personal perspective, it's because those larger topics are much harder to write about, as it requires much more time and even investment of personal money to buy books etc., and I even avoid some difficult topics in the fear of potentially spreading misinformation, exactly the thing that we want to fight. 

This means that, while rewriting the wrong articles is one of our top priorities, the actual rate these improvements are published is unfortunately very low. I fully admit that this is a bad thing.

I hope this provides a bit of context and I want to stress that it is my personal take on it and not an 'offical' one. Anyway, feedback and suggestions are always more than welcome. I'll look into the problems you raised and see if I can correct or remove them on the site.

"(although it will have to be good if it is to be better than Landships . . . )" :))  Since abuse is welcome, in some places, Landships isn't much better than Tanks Encyclopedia ;)

"but if it is to become the touchstone it shouldn't contain and perpetuate errors. We've got Wikipedia for that." I cannot agree more, and we have a lot of work ahead of us. We maintain a publicly accessible and editable Google Spreadsheet in which we record what we still need to cover and its a lot, new things are added each day...

Guys, I'm interested in WW1 armor only, so from Tanks Encyclopedia's articles I read almost only those on WW1. I see much improvement lately thanks to Leander, but still some articles need serious corrections. However, also many Landships articles need corrections because a lot of them are based on B.T. White's "Tanks and Other Armored Fighting Vehicles 1900 to 1918". It was published half a century ago and contains many errors.

Some valid points of criticism to which I do mostly agree. 

Although I'll have to disagree on the notion that we rely too heavily upon derivative English sources. As explained, that may have been like that in the past when most works were based on wikipedia, and as a matter of fact also on Landships as far ww1 articles were concerned, but this is not the case anymore. When I look at my own works, I almost exclusively use German sources for German/Austrian stuff, Dutch sources for Dutch stuff, and overall a mixture of English, German, Austrian, French, and Danish sources. 

Other examples are the articles related to Italy, Mexico, Spain, and Yugoslavia, to name just a few, which mostly use sources from the respective languages, with English sources mostly used only when appropriate.

I have found this site recently while doing research into some WW1 vehicles. I like the artwork, but pretty early on have dismissed most of the text due to errors and inaccuracies. I also sense that much of the text is captured from other sources, mistakes copied from other sites to theirs. I find it funny that the site made sure to mention that content writings are responsibility of each writer, but you can't directly email anyone on the site. Only one generic email, it may very well be one person behind the curtain with several pen names.

One last thing I find very funny is the site says you might be able to use their drawings, etc. under special circumstances and with permissions from them. However, all of the period pictures I see on the site are not their property.

I like the artwork on it though.

-Tony I

-- Edited by Tony I on Tuesday 8th of June 2021 02:57:33 AM