Talk:2006 Lebanon War

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This is not a soapbox, it is a bar of soap. This article isn't a soapbox, either!

Earlier discussions

• Archive 43
  • Infobox: IDF strength
  • Kidnapped vs. Captured
  • Number of Injured Israelis
  • Capitalization
  • Result of the war
  • Merkava Muddles and Miracles in Lebanon
  • Name
  • Character of Ground War
  • Imad Mughniyeh a Hezbollah commander?
  • Military significance of the conflict
  • "Claimed" in mostly civilian
  • Image inclusion
  • Isarig been using sockpuppets
  • The "Tabouleh" Line
  • Background
  • Resistance?
  • 2006 Lebanon war
  • "Result" wording.
    • 19.1 Sources that support putting "Widely considered Hizbullah Victory"
    • 19.2 proposal: "Hizbullah victory disputed"
  • GA Sweeps Review Pass
  • Difference Between the Existence of a Statement and the Truth of the Contents of the Statement
  • Look at what's happened to Battle of Bint Jbeil‎
  • Length
  • Captured vs. POW
  • Move to 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict

Please do not modify these archived discussions.

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Article Title

I know there have been many previous attempts to change the title of this article (some successful), but I am going to bring the issue up again. I think "2006 Lebanon war" fails as an adequate title for a number of reasons:

1. The Lebanese state was never part of the war.
2. It doesn't name either combatant--Hezbollah and Israel.
3. It is not a common name for the war in either Israel or Lebanon. Our article should reflect the terms people use to describe the war in real-world discourse.

Suggestions for alternative names:

1. 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war
2. 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war
3. Summer war in Lebanon
4. Summer war
5. 2006 Summer war
6. Second Lebanon war (official name in Israel)
7. July war (all but official name in Lebanon)

Suggestions? Thoughts? Screen stalker (talk) 12:34, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Given the attacks were perpetrated from sovereign Lebanese soil, by an organization participating in the Lebanese government and parliament, and operating undisturbed by the Lebanese military, the Lebanese state was very much involved, as an accomplice at least. okedem (talk) 12:56, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

But there was no declaration of war between Israel and Lebanon. The Lebanese military never entered into the fray (although some its soldiers were accidentally killed in bombings). Screen stalker (talk) 16:09, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it's not a traditional war, but the attacking body was one who was allowed to operate from within Lebanon's sovereign territory. As the most universally accepted meaning of sovereignty is a monopoly over the use of force, Hizbollah's actions can be seen as under the responsibility of Lebanon's government. I know the situation is WAY more complicated than that, with Syria and Iran meddling about, but on the face of it - this is Lebanon's responsibility. okedem (talk) 17:05, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Do note that the first war is named here 1982 Lebanon War. This also wasn't really a war against Lebanon itself, but against the PLO's forces, who were constantly launching terrorist attacks against northern Israel's towns. okedem (talk) 17:07, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not going to go into the 1982 war in too great a depth. Allow me to simply say that that is how this war is referred to in real-world discourse. Wouldn't you say that Hezbollah bears more responsibility for this war than Lebanon? Screen stalker (talk) 00:30, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the two are separate. Hezbollah plays a major part in Lebanese politics, enjoys wide support from a part of the populace. Although it's not the official Lebanese military, the Lebanese state is responsible for its actions.

Anyway - which name is more common in discourse (i.e. - news sites, etc.)? okedem (talk) 12:28, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I am going through the sources at the bottom of the article, and here are the terms they use:

Source 1 (Daily Star): July War.

Source 12 (Israeli MFA): Israel-Hizbullah Conflict.

Source 13 (Encarta) admittedly refers to the war as "Conflict with Lebanon," though it doesn't use that as a name.

Source 17 (Israeli MFA): The Second Lebanon war

Source 18 (AFP via Daily Star): July war

Source 23 (Lebanon Under Seige): July war and July 2006 War

After going through 30 sources I got a little tired, so I'll take a break. Screen stalker (talk) 13:34, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I would argue that the Lebanese government was a passive victim of this conflict initiated by Hizbollah when it invaded Israel territory without the consent of the Lebanese government. That Hizbollah was a participant in the Lebanese government does mean any culpability falls to the government when this rogue element initiated an action independent of that government. Since Hizbollah initiated the actions the onus of the war falls upon Hizbollah thus it is "Hizbollah's War"Judadem (talk) 15:31, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I haven't reviewed the name recently, but the last time I checked (June 2007), terms similar to "2006 Lebanon War" were far more common (60.5-86.5% of instances) than names similar to "2006 Israel-Hezbollah War" (9.4-20.9% of instances) or names similar to "2006 Israel-Lebanon War" (1.6-18.6% of instances). ← George ^[talk] 08:31, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if quantitative predominance is reason enough to go with one title over another. Consider this hypothetical example: If a dispute between the government and a minority group occurred in a country with no free press, and this dispute was under the radar of the Western media, then most coverage of this dispute would then use the gov't-preferred language. This doesn't seem to be reason enough for a wikipedia article on the dispute to adopt the gov't-preferred language. Of course, this is far from a perfect analogy, but the point is that predominance alone might not be a good enough reason to go with one title over another. Precision and accuracy should also be considered. (please correct me if there's some wikipedia policy or guideline that proves me wrong.) What about this title proposal, which takes the multiple opinions into account: "2006 Lebanon War Between Hezbollah and Israel." Gni (talk) 15:12, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Please review Wikipedia's policy on naming conventions for events: "If there is a particular common name for the event, it should be used even if it implies a controversial point of view... A common name or standing expression exists if most English speakers who are aware of the topic call it the same thing." The word "most" implies a quantitative analysis to me, and the best source I've been able to find for "English speakers" is internet search engines. These index billions of websites, so they are freer of potential use of "government-preferred language" that you mentioned may be present in Western media. The same predominant trend appears in these indexed common websites, news articles, and scholarly sources alike. ← George ^[talk] 09:33, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Google yielded the following results for the following names (note: all searches exclude pages that contain the word "wikipedia," in order to avoid circular naming):

"2006 Lebanon war": 30,800

"Second Lebanon war": 145,000

"Israel-Hezbollah war", "Israel-Hizbollah war", "Israel-Hizbullah war": 38,900, 1,130, 2,610, respecitvely (total of 42,640)

"Hezbollah-Israel war", "Hizbollah-Israel war", "Hizbullah-Israel war": 5,640, 501, 1,710, respectively (total of 7,851)

"Summer war" Lebanon: 29,000

"July war": 30,800

It seems the landslide winner is "Second Lebanon war," followed by some variation of "Israel-Hezbollah war," followed by "2006 Lebanon war," tied with "July war," followed by "Summer war." Screen stalker (talk) 20:01, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I tried the same thing with Yahoo!:

"2006 Lebanon war": 136,000

"Second Lebanon war": 743,000

"Israel-Hezbollah war", "Israel-Hizbollah war", "Israel-Hizbullah war": 305,000, 5,780, 19,000, respecitvely (total of 329,780)

"Hezbollah-Israel war", "Hizbollah-Israel war", "Hizbullah-Israel war": 28,100, 675, 1,900, respectively (total of 30,675)

"Summer war" Lebanon: 497,000

"July war": 131,000

The results are pretty similar. Screen stalker (talk) 21:08, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I repeated the same search with a news search engine: [news.google.com]. The numbers for this site will change a lot, fairly fast, because it stays up-to-date. These may be a little more reliable in terms of their accountability. I did not remove wikipedia from these searches, for obvious reasons.

"2006 Lebanon war": 31

"Second Lebanon war": 231

"Israel-Hezbollah war", "Israel-Hizbollah war", "Israel-Hizbullah war": 12, 0, 3, respecitvely (total of 15)

"Hezbollah-Israel war", "Hizbollah-Israel war", "Hizbullah-Israel war": 3, 0, 2, respectively (total of 5)

"Summer war" Lebanon: 30

"July war": 14 Screen stalker (talk) 00:30, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Allow me to add to these the results for "Israel-Hezbollah conflict" (hereafter IHC) and "Hezbollah-Israel conflict" (hereafter HIC). The term "wikipedia" excluded from search results. Spelling variations are in the same order as the three examples above.

Google: IHC: 21,500, 9,400, 1,620 (total of 32,520). HIC: 3,630, 200, 223 (total of 4,053) Yahoo!: IHC: 132,000, 1,300, 1,860 (total of 135,160). HIC: 14,800, 110, 111 (total of 15,021) Google news: IHC: 1, 0, 0 (total of 1). HIC: 3, 0, 0 (total of 3)

I think it is important to include these because these clearly prefer Israel and Hezbollah in the name (because they were the combatants), even though they use "conflict" instead of "war." Then again, I think this article did that a long time ago, didn't it? To be fair, I therefore searched "2006 Lebanon conflict." Here are the results:

Google: 1,860 Yahoo!: 2,080 Google news: 0 Screen stalker (talk) 21:46, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

These graphs show the clear trend: "Second Lebanon war" is leads heavily. The only other name which comes close on both counts is some variation of "Israel-Hezbollah war." "Summer war" remains a remote, but not lost, possibility, because of its showing on Yahoo! I tried loading the Google News Chart, but it gave me some problems. I guess that doesn't really matter, since the numbers are far too small to draw a general trend. Screen stalker (talk) 22:23, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

First, let me say that I don't object to "Second Lebanon war". Per naming conventions, similar names, such as World War II and Second World War, are interchangeable. However, I believe that another set of naming conventions state that, in general, military conflicts/wars should be listed with the year (I think it was the Military History WikiProject's guidelines, or something similar). So in general, I don't really have a preference between Second Lebanon war, Lebanon war II (never seen this used), 2006 Lebanon war, and Lebanon war of 2006 (this would be eliminated for being unnecessarily longer than the preceding). The only question that I've researched is whether "Lebanon war", "Israel-Hezbollah war", or "Israel-Lebanon war" was more common (including variations on spellings and orders).

The following is the chart I came up with when I last checked these three values a little under a year ago. The blue, red, and green boxes indicate the general trends that I had seen that supported "Lebanon war", "Israel-Hezbollah war", or "Israel-Lebanon war", respectively (again, including variants) . I did re-check a couple of these, and the gap appears to be even wider now, but you can click on any of the links to be taken to the equivalent google query to check the latest values. These were the best queries I could come up with.

Google search results for title variations across all websites, news articles, and scholarly sources (as of June 10, 2007)

Title variation query	All websites		News articles*		Scholarly sources
"Lebanon War" -1982 -"First Lebanon War" -"Israel-Lebanon War"†	661,000	68.7%	1,479	64.6%	22	51.2%
"Second Lebanon War"	102,000	10.6%	492	21.5%	2	4.7%
"2006 Lebanon War"	31,500	3.3%	8	0.3%	2	4.7%
Total (2006 Lebanon War)	794,500	82.6%	1,979	86.5%	26	60.5%
"Israel-Hezbollah War"‡	64,700	6.7%	88	3.8%	4	9.3%
"Israeli-Hezbollah War"‡	25,000	2.6%	186	8.1%	5	11.6%
"2006 Israel-Hezbollah War"&#135;	382	< 0.1%	0	0.0%	0	0.0%
Total (2006 Israel-Hezbollah War)	90,082	9.4%	274	12.0%	9	20.9%
"Israel-Lebanon War"	70,300	7.3%	31	1.4%	7	16.3%
"2006 Israel-Lebanon War"	7,250	0.8%	5	0.2%	1	2.3%
Total (2006 Israel-Lebanon War)	77,550	8.1%	36	1.6%	8	18.6%
* Limited to the last month, to eliminate any articles about the 1982 Lebanon War, and avoid recentism immediately following the end of the conflict. &#134; The addition of -1982 -"First Lebanon War" -"Israel-Lebanon War" to this query eliminates any overlapping results, or results that are about the 1982 Lebanon War, as well as any results about the 2006 Lebanon War that even mention the 1982 war, making this figure lower than it actually is. &#135; The spelling Hezbollah appears approximately ten times more often than either Hizbollah or Hizbullah.

Please review the notes at bottom as well, which indicate how I tried to get as accurate results as possible. Let me see if I can find the naming conventions talking about using the year in the title... ← George ^[talk] 09:36, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, it's a bit confusing. I think the general convention is to use "YEAR EVENT", but the military events style suggests "EVENT (YEAR)". It does prefer the common names, but also uses things like "First EVENT", "Second EVENT", etc., to refer to similar events in the same year... I have a feeling that's why we chose the year over the word "secondary", but again, I'm not entirely opposed to it. ← George ^[talk] 09:44, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

George, I think it is interesting how we can both search for the same thing using slightly different terms and find very different results. One thing that comes through from your search results is that the current name of the article as it is now ("2006 Lebanon war") is a rare appearance. Also, your first search result can cover events regarding the Lebanese civil war (such as this source, which is included in those results, along with thousands of others). In fact, these sources may relate to any number of conflicts (in the middle east, there are a lot of "Lebanon wars"). Another thing is that once you begin to exclude so many things from a search, the engine begins to drop search terms because it doesn't want to yield zero results. Also, I've noticed most of the sources in the first line include "Second Lebanon war" or "2006 Lebanon war" in them, so those get counted twice (or even three times). Also, you did not exclude wikipedia pages (which account for 34,800 of the 661,000 in the first line. Screen stalker (talk) 16:32, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

All good points. Again, when doing this research, I ignored differences between "2006 Lebanon war" and "Second Lebanon war", as my goal was to determine what the most common root name for the conflict was, evaluating "Lebanon war" versus "Israel-Hezbollah war" versus "Israel-Lebanon war". Eliminating any of the sources that cite the word "civil" is easy enough, as is eliminating any that even mention Wikipedia. I believe that prevalence of "Lebanon war" over "Israel-Hezbollah war" or "Israel-Lebanon war" (or "July war" or "Summer war") still stands though, even with the artificially lowered result count (from removing any articles that mention the 2006 war in addition to the older wars). I view the differences between "2006 Lebanon war" and "Second Lebanon war" to be qualitative, so I wouldn't oppose a proposal to rename to the latter. That said, I'd have to better familiarize myself with the military event naming conventions to determine exactly what they would point to between "2006 Lebanon war", "Second Lebanon war", and "Lebanon war (2006)". ← George ^[talk] 01:18, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

I think that the name "Second Lebanon war" would be a better name than the one currently used, and would be happy to work under it while we discuss. Are there any objections? Screen stalker (talk) 22:33, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

Are you asking if it's okay to move the page, or if it's okay to request a move? You likely can't move this page yourself (unless you're an administrator), so you should probably file the move using the steps listed under "Requesting potentially controversial moves" in WP:RM. This topic has been discussed so many times in the past that I'm sure it will be controversial to some. ← George ^[talk] 00:49, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for directing me towrads WP:RM. I have read a good part of this policy, and think this is the most appropriate course of action for the time being. If so, I would like to see if anyone has any objections to moving this page to "Second Lebanon war." I don't think that would be the absolute best name for the article, but it is certainly better than its current name, and it would be a good starting point for what is bound to be a long discussion on the article's title. Thoughts? Screen stalker (talk) 13:24, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I applaud your efforts here, with all the pie charts... I have no objections to the move (though I'm fine with the current name). okedem (talk) 13:46, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, I think I object until this email organizing a concerted group challenge to the title is clarified:-

4/22/08 11:22 AM Page 1 of 1 [Isra-pedia] Changing the title of "2006 Lebanon war" From: I <3 Israel (yonathan@ou.edu) Sent: Wed 4/09/08 7:48 AM To: isra-pedia (isra-pedia@googlegroups.com)

Hello, all. The discussion about voting reminded me that some time ago there were a few votes on how to name the article that wound up being named "2006 Lebanon war." It wound up being so named for many reasons, but mostly because the supporters of this name wanted to communicate their opinion that this war was conducted against Lebanon, not just Hezbollah. I think it might be appropriate to restart discussion on that title, if there are some people here who would be willing to support me in proposing a new title (such as "2006 Israel-Hezbollah war"). What do you guys think?'

Nishidani (talk) 19:19, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I changed the indentation on your last post. I hope that's alright.

Discussion on ths issue has taken place many times. I have seen it in the archives and in actual discussion. I don't think a blog posting will have much of an impact on it, especially considering everyone who has thus far contributed has made a considerable number of contributions to this article before.

Something has occurred to me: "Israel-Lebanon war" gets counted in its own category and in the "Lebanon war" category. So I reran the "Lebanon war" search under the terms "Lebanon war" Hezbollah Israel -wikipedia -"Israel-Lebanon war". I hope we can all agree that any article worth looking at will mention Hezbollah and Israel. This yields 159,000 results. Screen stalker (talk) 21:06, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, due to the way Google works, you can't modify the query in that manner without drastically skewing the results. A search of "Lebanon war" Hezbollah Israel -wikipedia nets 449,000 results, while a search of "Lebanon war" Hezbollah Israel -wikipedia -"Israel-Lebanon war" nets only 159,000 results. However, if you just search for "Israel-Lebanon war", you only get 44,000 results - obviously far less than could possibly cause a 300,000 difference in results. ← George ^[talk] 09:09, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

That is an excellent point. So what can we do if search engines make these kinds of mistakes? What are our options? Screen stalker (talk) 16:41, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Please don't delete the section of Gabriel Al Amin

Please don't delete the section of Gabriel Al Amin. This is a very important section, it shows the Lebanese perspective of the conflict, of both during and after the war. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nicholausz (talk • contribs) 23:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Summary of Winograd Commission Report

Hi, I've included a summary of the summary of the W.C.R. of material i feel is relevant to this page. However, in doing so I also seem to have deleted the section heading "Media Controversy". I've already self reverted on another page (mea culpa) and I'm afraid of doing so again. So if somebody feels like editing it back in i'd be very grateful. thanks Delad (talk) 02:29, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I hope I'm not misleading you. But self-reverting to fix a mistake, explaining the reason, doesn't really count in the 3RR rule does it. I've self-reverted to correct an error of mine on a page where I have reverted others earlier in the day, and no one took objection. If anything, it is an indication of probity.Nishidani (talk) 10:31, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for clearing that up for me. Delad (talk) 01:07, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

FYI - arbitration on Israeli Wiki Lobbying

I have filed an arbitration request in regards to the Israeli Wiki Lobbying and attacks uncovered, which have an impact on this article and possibly it's editors: Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration#Israeli Wiki Lobbying. Lawrence Cohen § t/e 16:28, 23 April 2008 (UTC)