wikipedia research - compare language versions
Channel: Leigh Blackall
Date: 13/10/2017

Wikipedia offers a number of interesting opportunities for research, and here I compare the language versions of Wikipedia articles for the moment in history, the Battle of Long Tan, in Vietnam in 1966. 

Firstly, looking at the English article we can see an extensive piece of work, full of extended text, references, images and quotes. As with many English articles can be links to different language versions of the same topic, and in the Long Tan article there happens to be a Vietnamese article.

It's important to note, if you don't know already, that the different language versions of Wikipedia are developed separately. The Vietnamese article is no more a translation of the English article than the English article is of the Vietnamese. The different language Wikipedia projects operate independently, but may well often cross check with each other, especially the English work given its level of contributions.

When I open a webpage that is in a language other than English, I am prompted by Google to have it machine translated into English. If you're trying this method, need some form of translation, and don't see this prompt, just copy the URL for the page and go and paste it into to Google translate directly. https://translate.google.com.au/

Looking at the Vietnamese Wikipedia article for the Battle of Long Tan, that Google has machine translated into English for me, I straight away notice a much smaller article. I don't know to what degree of development this particular article is for the Vietnamese, but it wouldn't take much to determine. Maybe compare it against other significant military history, as a suggestion as to how significant the Battle of Long Tan is to Wikipedia volunteers at least.

The second thing to notice in the Vietnamese article is that there are a number of contradictions to the English article, perhaps most notably being the casualty count for the Vietnamese participants in the battle. In the English article the count for Vietnamese dead stands at an official looking number of 245 exactly. In the Vietnamese article this number is held to be somewhere around 50. 

Now it's normal in the English project at least to expect a citation and reference to support any factual claim, and we can see the same footnoted practice in the Vietnamese article. There are two citations in a block of quoted text, one going to a Way Back Machine archive of an Australian website anzacday.org.au where excerpts have been included from a variety of sources, including the Terry Burtsall book of 1990, describing his experience in dealing with the dead and the body count in the 3 days directly after the war. 

"Would a shell-shocked digger count an arm, a trunk and a leg scattered over several metres as one body or three bodies? Nobody knew or cared at the time, and certainly not the people doing the counting. ... Looking back I don't really think that I would have seen more than 50 bodies and I spent three days in the area. How can one tell in such a situation? The only thing for sure is that the body count was not done accurately, as any private who was on the spot will testify."

Conversely, the reference used to support the claim of 245 Vietnamese dead in the English article is more difficult to verify. It goes to The Encylopaedia of Australia's Battels, by Chris Clark 2010. https://books.google.com.au/books?id=gzI1Q6AvFoQC&dq=The+Encyclopaedia+of+Australia%27s+Battles&source=gbs_navlinks_s

At this point I have to stop, as I can't verify Chris Clark's sources for the 245 Vietnamese dead, but we'd assume it would be from official Australian Army records, which brings us back to Terry Burtsall's account of how reliable body counting was, and could be in such horrific circumstances.