Talk:List of conflicts by duration

Separate columns

Would be valuable to have beginning and end of war is two separate columns to allow to order using those dates. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 175.157.75.235 (talk) 05:55, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Finished as per request. AndreyKva (talk) 23:14, 5 October 2016 (UTC)

Series of wars

Just want to know what people think. Should series of wars (with breaks in between) be counted or not? Personally, I believe they shouldn't. I think this article should be about the longest periods of uninterrupted armed conflict between at least two parties. AndreyKva (talk) 00:18, 6 October 2016 (UTC)

I think for the most part they shouldn't but series which are referred to as a single war (mainly just thinking about the Hundred Years' War) should. 74.93.73.62 (talk) 00:48, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Germanic Wars?

Come on, people, seriously? This is kind of silly. Is there really a point in listing this as the longest "war" in history? There are many things problematic with this. First, it begins with an obscure and poorly documented attack on a then very peripheral area to the Roman world (the supposed Germanic raid on Olbia in Crimea in 220 BC, which wasn't even part of the Republic until over a century and a half later, and even in the later empire was on the edges and ruled by Bosporan client kings). Then nothing happens for over a hundred years and suddenly the Germanics show up again and the "war" re-ignites? Even if we were to start with the more well-known Cimbrian War, we can hardly call these largely disparate conflicts between Rome and various Germanic speaking tribes, many of which weren't that friendly with each other, a single war or conflict. Germanic tribes is such a broad term encompassing so many people that it can be used very loosely. It is true that the events of the Migration Period were more closely interrelated and had a big impact on the fall of Rome and the birth of medieval Europe, but the Germanic speakers were not a unified people and various tribes had different agendas, some serving as allies of Rome. Romans didn't even have a clear picture of which barbarians to the north of them were Germanic and which were Celtic or something else, and sometimes got peoples mixed up or just lumped them together, which adds more problems to this concept. Word dewd544 (talk) 06:41, 24 February 2017 (UTC)

Minimum Length

Personally, I don't think wars that lasted less than ~50 years are notable enough to be on this list. Is there a defined minimum length yet? 74.93.73.62 (talk) 00:58, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Although I approve of your idea in principle, the notability of a war is not always a product of its length - witness the First and Second World War... Filursiax (talk) 01:56, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Reconquista?

Has anyone bothered reading the linked article? It was not a period of continuous war, and certainly not a single conflict between Cristians and Muslims (most of the time there were alliances between kingdoms of different religions, as well as fighting between kingdoms of the same religion). It should not be here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.76.89.51 (talk) 10:48, 16 June 2017 (UTC)

Date Formatting/Sortability

The dates on this list should really be formatted using the DTS template standard, as this should allow rows to be sorted by individual date columns. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rohaq (talk • contribs) 15:04, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

Update: I've now added sortable dates to these columns. I've also disabled sorting on the Duration column, as the alphanumeric sort here resulted in a nonsense sort. There are ways to add a hidden sort value to this however, which should be explored. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rohaq (talk • contribs) 00:09, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Second update: I threw together some regular expressions and figured out how to quickly do the above too. There were some issues with wars that crossed the BCE/AD point, requiring manual numerical inputs, but it works. Rohaq (talk) 01:04, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

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Age templates

My recent edits are part of a plan to change some of the age templates to use Module:Age to provide more consistency and more features. The change is tricky because the module gives an error message if a date is invalid (and lots of existing dates are invalid), so I have to fix various problems before changing the template concerned. I'm using {{Age in years, months, weeks and days/sandbox}} in this article at the moment. That has allowed the removal of many {{age in days}} templates which were previously required to generate sort keys. This is the only article using that template in a way that requires certain quirks, so I wanted to start by removing them. I will remove the "/sandbox" after updating the main template.

An example of the template as used in this article follows. This example omits "/sandbox" for simplicity. The line under the template wikitext is the output from Special:ExpandTemplates.

{{Age in years, months, weeks and days|0718-01-01|1492-01-01|sortable=table}}
data-sort-value="7005282698000000000"|774 years

The sort key is based on the number of days in the age. If times-of-day are given, fractional days are included. All age templates supported by the module use the same sort key so mixtures of the templates will sort consistently.

The new template allows two full dates to be entered and optional BC/AD or BCE/CE can be used. There must be exactly four digits in the year. Johnuniq (talk) 02:25, 28 February 2018 (UTC)

Silliness

Some of the extremely long ones seem just silly, and I don't think they should be included. I see that others have voiced similar opinions here, often on specific instances. I just want to add my voice to those.

The page lists periods of hundreds of years in which two nations or peoples sometimes were at war with each other as being a single instance of conflict, regardless of the fact that there are often several decades or even centuries of peace between actual distinct wars, sometimes even including formal peace treaties, in those periods. And even if this might, in some cases, be somewhat sensible for the vague term "conflicts", the fact that "List of longest wars" redirects to this page makes such things seem just ridiculous. -Rwv37 (talk) 19:07, 27 November 2018 (UTC)

I want to concur with this. To treat the Reconquista as a continuous process, let alone a war, is not serious in the slightest and, worse, distorts the discussion about what it was into a specific ideologic position. Logsemán (talk) 07:34, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Yes, this really seems more motivated by ginning up spectacular figures than communicating anything useful to the reader. It feels arbitrary to bundle together all the Anglo-French Wars but not the World Wars, for example. If nothing else, the list needs some kind of explicit methodology, and I think periods of conflict should have their own list separate from singular continuous wars. I'm sure the definitions can get tricky and there are weird edge cases, but there must be a better approach than this! TheJames (talk) 16:45, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

"A conflict" vs. "A series of wars" vs. "A war"

I'd like to add my support to several of the voices above. This should not be a list of "series of wars" (and even less, a list of "conflicts", as the title states) but of "individual wars". Anything else simply confuses the issue.

I think the Hundred Years' War should be treated as a single war, since there is a long tradition among historians to do so. There were two notable breaks in hostilities, but they were relatively short (9+26=35 years out of 116 years for the war as a whole); and the parties at war and their objectives were more or less the same throughout. But many other "series of wars" on this list make little sense to me. Two more or less random examples:

(1) The "Anglo-French Wars" - lasting from 1193 to 1898 (705 years!). These wars were not at all continuous, and their objectives ranged from medieaval squabbles between royal families to global capitalist colonialism. By lumping them all together into a single monster war, we only confuse the issue, particularly when the lengths of such artificial series are compared (making the mostly low-intensity, sporadic conflicts of the Reconquista the longest war in history).

(2) The "Chechen–Russian conflict" - lasting from 1785 and still ongoing - a series of wars that (so far) has lasted 234 years. Hidden within these years are two substantial periods of peace (perhaps unwanted, but still peace), lasting from 1859 to 1917 (58 years) and from 1944 to 1991 (47 years), plus another 10 years or so in the 1920's-30's - that's about 110 years out of 234 - almost half of the entire duration of the series.

Comparing the lengths of such "series of wars" with each other - and with the "individual wars" that figure on the list - is very problematic. If the Russian colonial wars in Chechnya are one war, then why not the "Irish-British conflict" (1641-1922 = 281 years), or the "Indian-British conflict" (1600-1947 = 346 years), or, for that matter, the "European Wars", starting, say, in 400 AD, and still going strong? Moreover, the list also includes individual wars that may or may not also be part of a series - e.g. the "Caucasian War" (1817-1864 = 47 years), which overlaps with the "Chechen-Russian Conflict"; or the Hundred Years' War, which is part of the "Anglo-French Wars".

Maybe the whole idea of this list is problematic? It supports the illusion that the length of a war is one of its most crucial aspects, and thus invites a politically, nationally or ideologically motivated competition as to which war was longest - and thus, in some sense, most important. Maybe the list should simply be deleted from Wikipedia? Either that, or we need some rather stringent rules that determine what is to be counted as a war - perhaps the simplest would be to stick to the consensus among professional historians? Historians agree that there was a Hundred Years War and a Thirty Years War, but they do not agree that was a single "First-half-of-the-20th-century-global-war" - so we stick to the standard nomenclature: The First World War and The Second World War.

It might be useful to compare this list with the List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll. That list also contains some doubtful instances (but the Reconquista, for example, is marked with "Cannot be considered a single war), but on the whole it is much more restrictive than the present list.

Filursiax (talk) 00:16, 25 November 2019 (UTC)

World War II

According to the school book I have read, the beginning of World War II is 3rd of August 1914 when Germany attacked on Belgium who announced being neutral about the conflict between France, Russia and Germany. (talks) Zaki Frahmand 04:36, 4 July 2021

References

• I assume you mean World War I. We go by what that article says, you can discuss it there. Dream Focus 07:30, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

This list needs proper inclusion criteria

As has been discussed multiple times above, this list presents what are essentially WP:FRINGE-sourced, or self-calculated lengths for a number of conflicts. There ARE reliable sources for conflict-length (e.g., Appendix A-1 in Bennett, D. S., & Stam, A. C. (1996). The Duration of Interstate Wars, 1816-1985. The American Political Science Review, 90(2), 239–257. [1] ), but you will note that the lengths they give differ to that given here. We need proper inclusion criteria sourced to reliable sources which would allow us to exclude/include appropriate conflicts. FOARP (talk) 20:30, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

• The articles linked to have the information referenced in them. If you disagree with that number, then discuss it over at the other article. Dream Focus 07:33, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

@Dream Focus: - We cannot and should not simply rely on something said on a page on Wikipedia, because Wikipedia is not a reliable source. Conflict lengths should be reliably referenced on this page and if we're going to be comparing them as we are here in a single list the lengths need to be calculated according to the same criteria (otherwise it is not a meaningful comparison), criteria that should also be reliably sourced. The great news is that there are reliable sources that actually do this for us (e.g., the above paper). In fact there is a whole field of study about conflict-duration that has come up with standardised ways of measuring conflict-length, data-sets, and what impacts it.

Except in the cases where the conflict has a very clear and uncontested beginning and end, such that working out the length of the conflict is simple mathematics, we should not be indulging in original research by trying to calculate conflict-lengths ourselves based on arbitrary criteria. We should also not be indulging in WP:FRINGE-sourced claims about conflicts being the longest war of all history when it is trivial to point out that the "conflict" is actually a group of widely-spaced conflicts. FOARP (talk) 08:59, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

PS - the Appendix mentioned above comes from the COW (Correlates of war) dataset which can be accessed here. COW calculate the duration of conflicts as described in this article on page 20, specifically:

"The coding rules governing the duration of wars have remained unchanged from Resort to Arms and rely on the war’s start date, end date, and breaks in the hostilities.

"Each war’s opening date is that of the formal declaration, but only if it is followed immediately by sustained military combat. If hostilities precede the formal declaration and continue in a sustained fashion up to and beyond that latter date, the first day of combat is used. Even in the absence of a declaration, the sustained continuation of military incidents or battle, producing the requisite number of battle deaths, is treated as a war, with the first day of combat again used for computing duration" (Resort to Arms, 66).

The war then continues until its termination, or as long as there is sustained military combat resulting in 1,000 battle-related deaths per year. The end date may be the date of an armistice or cease-fire agreement, as long as conflict does not resume thereafter. If there is a delay between the cessation of military action and the armistice, or if the armistice fails to halt the hostilities, then the end date is the day that most clearly demarcates the close of sustained military conflict.

The date of the final peace treaty would not be used unless it coincided with the end of combat."

This delivers a meaningful criteria, used in a dataset used by reliable sources, to calculate the length of a conflict. It would obviously exclude most of the (as Logsemán said above) "silly" ultra-long conflicts presently included here. Similarly it would take into account Filursiax's concerns about serieses of conflicts versus discrete conflicts FOARP (talk) 11:45, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

This is a detailed and precise methodology based on military hostilities. It should work in most cases. -- GreenC 16:38, 13 January 2022 (UTC)

That is one set of academics' methodology, how do we know those are generally accepted criteria? Obviously we don't. Few modern conflicts start with any formal declaration of war. "The war then continues until its termination..." is extremely vague and leads to the ridiculous cases I identified of the Korean War and the 6 Day War - when did those end? "...or as long as there is sustained military combat resulting in 1,000 battle-related deaths per year" is a rather high threshold for cutoff and solely on this basis almost all of the supposedly ongoing conflicts would not qualify. There are no generally accepted criteria of conflict duration. Mztourist (talk) 03:27, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

A simple check on JSTOR shows that the Correlates of War project is very, very widely cited in the academic literature as a database for information on conflicts. Meanwhile the present sourcing ("someone somewhere on Wikipedia said the length was X") is an obvious failure of WP:Wikipedia is not a reliable source and makes this article essentially WP:OR/WP:SYNTH since the lengths are not calculated according to the same standard. I have no objection to keeping the article-stated length in a separate column so long as a citation for that length is provided on this page, but the default ranking in terms of length should come from a reliable source, and the COW database appears to be one. FOARP (talk) 09:37, 14 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't regard 1,536 citations as convincing of widespread academic acceptance, particularly as many of the citations refer to the entire project and not the specific methodology of determining conflict duration. Mztourist (talk) 08:22, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Quote: "I don't regard 1,536 citations as convincing of widespread academic acceptance". Sorry, but LOL.
COW is the most widely-used database of conflict correlates in existence, and has been in continuous use and operation for more than 30 years. It originates in the Small & Singer's Resort to Arms which is an seminal work in this field since it was originally published in 1983. Against that you've got using Wikipedia as a source. FOARP (talk) 10:53, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

PS - the COW dataset also includes data on many more inter-state and intra-state wars than this page does (the intra-state conflicts dataset has 420 rows, each with a length of the conflict in days; the inter-state data-set includes 227 separate conflicts, and extends to more than 400 rows as they give a listing for each participant in multi-lateral conflicts). It also DOES include the Six Day War and the Korean war (but not our silly listing of a "Korean Conflict" that no-one actually believes in actually ongoing war). And we're not even talking about removing the present lengths (so long as these can be sourced on the page), just add an additional column for the COW lengths and use COW to do the default listing. FOARP (talk) 11:42, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

You can LOL all you like, but 1,536 citations isn't a lot for an academic source and you continue to miss the point that those are citations of the project, not the methodology for determining conflict duration which is what we are discussing. I have never suggested that WP can be used as a source. There is indisputably an ongoing Korean Conflict, no-one says its a war. Mztourist (talk) 03:16, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

1,536 citation IS a lot for a single source, particularly in the field of International Relations. For comparison, it is roughly the same order of magnitude of cites as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (5,543 JSTOR hits) and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (5,467 JSTOR hits), and a multiple of the Encyclopedia of American Religions (227 JSTOR hits) and the Oxford Dictionary of Saints (261 JSTOR hits), all of which are standard reference texts. Most of the citations do use the duration statistics. And you're still not engaging with the fact that we're presently using Wikipedia as a source, and that for this page not to be WP:OR/WP:SYNTH the lengths need to be calculated according to the same criteria - in fact you're quite pointedly just ignoring this point as though attacking a (highly reputable, widely-used, academic) source were sufficient to justify using no sourcing at all. FOARP (talk) 20:41, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

What is a war and what is a conflict?

A number of times above the point of overly long ongoing conflicts was brought up. But I believe a long but sustained conflict, even a series of related conflicts, can still be regarded as a single event, and this can have a start and an end. Why not? Aso, there were multiple wars within, say, the Yugoslav wars, but that can be treated as a single event, comprised of multiple wars or conflicts. Same with any large-scale wars (both World Wars, the Afghan wars, etc). Long-standing conflicts, mainly ethnic, that span hundreds of years, are nevertheless still a single event, even if there are long periods of peacetime. Jmj713 (talk) 23:05, 15 January 2022 (UTC)

Can you find reliable sources saying that generally, when measuring and comparing the lengths of different conflicts, you should simply group different conflicts separated by long periods of peace this way? Especially when reliable sources in the IR field don't do this? FOARP (talk) 06:51, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

Not different conflicts, but related. Take American Indian Wars, for instance. Here is a sourced article and an infobox with the duration. This overarching conflict spans hundreds of years and multiple various wars and conflicts, but is overall a single event. Jmj713 (talk) 15:23, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

1) The article does not state that conflict continued for any specific length 2) even if it did, to give a meaningful comparison other lengths would have to be calculated according to the same methodology. FOARP (talk) 20:21, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Franco Moroccan conflicts

Is this even considered a single war?? There is no single article with the name, and no citation for its length. I suggest it be removed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:646:8400:1ED0:445:C661:8465:3ED6 (talk) 07:24, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

• • • Yes, the slow colonization of Morocco (in violation of international agreements but with the backing of a majority of Great Powers of the time) can be considered a single slow conflict in multiple parts. The obvious violations were not only tolerated but positively exhorted by France's partners. Chesspride19:35, 27 August 2024 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.186.81.238 (talk)

Consistency

The three wars at the top are listed in the "Series of conflicts" section as well, but with diverging dates given. IMO they should be - with all remaining uncertainty - show the same dates on a single page. The Arauco war's end differs by 65 years, already the contentious time period alone would make the list. --Ulkomaalainen (talk) 21:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Meaning of the colors

There is no legend or description explaining what the colored rows mean. Apparently, blue means the conflict is still ongoing... but then what does red mean? Can anyone explain this? Bzzzing (talk) 22:17, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

Red was added 23 November 2022 by Quellenbrunnen with no explanation.[2] Is it ongoing wars with many recent deaths? PrimeHunter (talk) 03:05, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

I've reverted it. Bkatcher (talk) 17:43, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Iraq war missing?

Is there a reason Iraq War (2003-2011) is excluded from article? Yodabyte (talk) 00:46, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

Formatting Consistency and Units

The default sorting of this article is pseudo-ordinal, with the longest and shortest conflicts at the top and bottom of the table respectively, and with a general trend from longer to shorter, but there are several inconsistencies, such as the presence of the Aksumite-Persian Wars as the fourth entry. Should this list be default sorted at all, and if so, by what criteria? Additionally, the entry for the Aksumite-Persian wars does not have a unit of time specified after "9-10". It appears to have been generated using a logical command, and I'm unsure of how to add the correct unit to the entry. Snarkticfox (talk) 19:38, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Rome v Scotland

Not included? Must have lasted 200 years and it left Hadrian’s Wall as evidence 86.18.93.76 (talk) 23:40, 4 February 2024 (UTC)

World War 2?

I did not find it 2A02:587:E938:6400:890C:9DE:9933:EE38 (talk) 18:32, 18 February 2024 (UTC)