Talk:Civilian casualty ratio

2008–09 Gaza War - Palestinian casualties - B'Tselem

The numbers in the chart don't make any sense: 759 + 350 != 1391 and with the current numbers the civilian casuality ratio should be 55% not 26%.

I'm not familiar with the source, one seems to be a dead link, and the other to a stats page which has the 1391 number.

This part of the chart needs to be redone. Ytr1m (talk) 23:07, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Link elsewhere for I-P casualty discussions

There are much more in-depth discussions of casualties and how many were civilians, including criticism of various sources (such as the IDF). We should link to one of the sections in Casualties of the Israel-Hamas war for the criticism and note this briefly in the article.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 01:52, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

@NadVolum, feel free to give feedback on how this should be covered.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 06:20, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

OR

Rosguill can you please expand on the addition of the OR tag? How can the article be improved? How would you like to see it structured differently? VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 02:38, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

As I noted in that edit, right now the article is based on a grab bag of news sources that mention civilian casualty ratios in passing as part of their coverage of ongoing news related to conflicts. The article should be based on articles that centrally take up the question of civilian casualty ratios, their calculations, etc., preferably in peer-reviewed literature, and the inclusion of examples from individual conflicts should only be included if this core literature makes reference to it. A quick Google Scholar search would suggest that there's lots of good sources, including meta-analyses like [1] which are precisely the sort of source that should be used to shape an article like this (another good source I came across in that quick search: [2]) _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:14, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

To be clear, as some of the sections do cite quality sources, my sense is that several of the conflict-specific sections are likely WP:UNDUE, or at least undue-as-written. A few, like the Chechen Wars section, lack any citation that links the conflict to the broader literature on civilian casualty ratios; others, like the Arab-Israeli conflict, likely warrant some mention but appear to include far more detail based on news reports than seems likely to be appropriate. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 19:52, 16 February 2025 (UTC)

I agree that we should use "articles that centrally take up the question of civilian casualty ratios, their calculations etc" etc as opposed to "news sources that mention civilian casualty ratios in passing". However, while sometimes such articles try to cover multiple conflicts (eg this one you pointed above, and note it's already used in the article), other sources (such as this in-depth coverage written by a subject matter expert) tend to focus on a single war.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 04:11, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

I think that the example of the AOAV source is a bit different from what I was cautioning against, as that is an article that centrally takes up the question of the proportion of civilian casualties in the conflict and coverage of practices of its calculation, rather than seeking to simply cover the war and assert that there has been a given number of casualties. Some of the other material concerning the competing narratives and counts, however, seems to get too in the weeds. Especially insofar as they just assert different numbers without providing analysis and coverage of the methodology, I think the dueling reports between the UN and the IDF, for instance, don't really seem DUE--if we want to include coverage of this difference and dispute, we should just look to comprehensive academic sources and follow their claims.

More generally, for anyone willing to put a lot more work into restructuring this article, I suspect this could be a better-written and more informative article if it was restructured to focus on what RS say about the calculation of civilian casualty records as a practice and general trends over time, rather than providing statistics for a wide (but by no means comprehensive) range of individual conflicts. I think that Civilian casualty's organization is a more appropriate approach to a similar topic. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 14:58, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Can you propose a structure for this article? Like what should the sections be and what should they be called? And do you think it would be helpful if you tagged specific sections and sentences so I can then go and fix those specific issues? VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 02:47, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I think reframing the "Global estimates" section as a History section may be more appropriate. Much of the content in this section already fits that model. I don't think splitting the article up by conflict is necessarily helpful or warranted, and the arbitrary sub-division of some conflicts into specific campaigns (e.g. Drone strikes in Pakistan) is disconcerting. By contrast, the core literature spends a fair amount of time talking about how changes in the rate of civilian casualties are the consequence of changes in military tactics and technologies used, and in the international legal/political paradigms that facilitate the calculation of these statistics to greater or lesser degrees, but this is more or less absent from the article. It's hinted at in the aforementioned awkward subsection titles, and briefly discussed in the Arab-Israeli conflict section, but for the most part the article reads like a list of arbitrary statistics about seemingly random conflicts, without context. A fair amount of the claims in the by-conflict sections could potentially be woven into the historical narrative rather than as a standalone conflict section. Depending on the depth of additional coverage, it may be worthwhile to have separate sections devoting greater detail to the methods and complications of civilian casualty ratio calculation, and/or to media studies analyses of how CCR analyses are used in the media/politics/etc. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 03:27, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Do you think it might be warranted to spin off an article called List of wars by civilian casualty ratio, where much of the material can be summarized and moved. Similar to how List of wars between democracies was spunoff from Democratic peace theory.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 13:34, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps? The Frontiers piece would begin to make a case for WP:LISTN, and additional coverage could exist. To be honest, reading through the literature I'm not entirely convinced that this article should be separate from Civilian casualty. In theory this page is more about the contraposition of civilian to military casualties than civilian casualties in isolation, but I'm not really seeing much of a dividing line within how civilian casualties are discussed: they're essentially always counter posed to military casualties _signed, Rosguill ^talk 14:05, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

I strongly believe that "Civilian casualty ratio" is a standalone encyclopedic topic. Consider this academic paper, cited 170+ times, dedicated to discussing the myth of the 90% civilian casualty ratio. Or this paper, cited 80+ times, that showed that while the number of civilian casualties varied quite widely, but the civilian casualty ratio was remarkably similar across different centuries. This paper, cited 60+ times, dedicates the 2nd section (out of 5 sections) to changes in this ratio. This paper explains that CCR (among other things) "can be used for monitoring, and to make comparisons between time periods, geographic areas, combatant forces, and between weapons, tactics or rules of engagement." This paper tracks CCR across the Israel-Gaza conflict to make inferences about loosening rules of engagement over time. The motivation for CCR comes from Proportionality (law), "whereby attacks on military targets should not inflict civilian casualties that are disproportionate to military gains", making it necessary to judge civilian casualties in context of military ones. This is why sometimes its not the number of civilian casualties that is politicized but rather the ratio of civilian to military casualties (by way of disputing number of military casualties).. VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 16:41, 19 February 2025 (UTC) VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 16:41, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Ok, but Civilian casualty isn’t a priori only about raw numbers as opposed to ratios; the questions surrounding calculation and interpretation seem like aspects of the general topic that could easily be included as a central part of that article, rather than spun off and kept separate _signed, Rosguill ^talk 17:30, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

Civilian casualty is a much broader topic and currently that article is quite underdeveloped so I'm not sure if we can move a lot of material there without UNDUE problems. (And as indicated above, I do think there's a lot of encyclopedic material on this topic). Also, most of the subtopics in that article do have their own articles, like collateral damage, international humanitarian law etc.VR _{(Please ping on reply)} 18:01, 19 February 2025 (UTC)

That seems reasonable; there’s clearly a fair amount of improvement that could be done to either article independently (which could likely be said of most broad concept articles, especially those with political content) _signed, Rosguill ^talk 18:12, 19 February 2025 (UTC)