Hacker News Reader

Comment by tallanvor | Hacker News Reader

The creator's definition of a "battle" is very different than how most people would define them. A just one example: this site considers the 1980 siege at the Iranian Embassy in London as a battle, which I doubt most people would agree with.

View on HN

It's missing lots of rap battles though.

Yep, it describes accidentally loading nuclear cruise missiles on a bomber as a battle:

http://dbpedia.org/page/2007_United_States_Air_Force_nuclear...

The word battle is not used on the page you linked.

The map says that it's listing battles. It (the map) lists the incident that dtparr says was not a battle. As part of his/her claim that the incident was not a battle, dtparr supplies a link containing details of the incident. You note that the link does not use the word "battle". I think you are confirming dtparr's point.

And 2008 UEFA Cup Final Riots in Manchester. "Battles" in Europe post 1946 was definitely the first thing I noticed that looked odd.

There also seems to be a surprising lack of battles across the eastern steppes by the Mongols.

Definitely could use some more information of how they decided what a battle is - or the data source at least

There's very little data on the Mongols unfortunately, especially since they were nomadic and moved so much, one dot in the middle of Mongolia just says "Mongol Battles".

But the data for much of their conquests doesn't exist.

Right. It's ridiculous that the most violent and dominating empire in the history of mankind is not included here.

I thought the UK was rather well represented actually.

It also breaks Gettysburg down into four battles—Gettysburg itself, Pickett's Charge, Little Round Top and Big Round Top. I guess that's one way to do it.

As for the data that came from dbpedia, we took all events with a some kind of a date and location that have the rdf:type http://dbpedia.org/ontology/MilitaryConflict. This seems to include all events in which the military was involved. See our blog on how we gathered the data: http://nodegoat.net/blog.s/14/a-wikidatadbpedia-geography-of...

This.

Did you know Texas and Oklahoma fought a "battle"? http://dbpedia.org/page/Red_River_Bridge_War

The most unexpected part of there was that Texas did not win.

> The Bridge War, also called the Red River Bridge War or the Toll Bridge War, was a 1931 bloodless boundary conflict between the U.S. states of Oklahoma and Texas over an existing toll bridge and a new free bridge crossing the Red River.

A battle between bridge trolls.

It's using the Wikipedia definition. Data seems to come from Wikidata.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com