Talk:Israeli Defense Forces

Redirect category

Context: This discussion was opened after some back-and-forth in the edit history about whether to categorize this redirect using {{R from incorrect name}} or {{R from alternative name}}. Sdkb ^talk 16:44, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

@Wbm1058: I do think I was a little unclear about what I meant when I said regularization, I meant linguistic regularization. That's why I think this is an incorrect name instead of an alternative name. Now about the other articles you linked, as you can see in the first line of Israeli Ground Forces, it is not a literal translation, זְרוֹעַ הַיַּבָּשָׁה translates to "The (Dry) Land Arm", the army is not called the Israeli Ground Forces in Hebrew. This is the same with the Israeli Air Force, which is זְרוֹעַ הָאֲוִיר וְהֶחָלָל in Hebrew, it translates to "Air and Space Arm". The thing both of those examples have in common is that they don't mention Israel at all. However, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli Navy both mention Israel in their original Hebrew. The difference being that the Israel Defense Forces uses the Hebrew word לְיִשְׂרָאֵל, which translates to "to Israel" or "for Israel". While the Israeli Navy uses the Hebrew word הישראלי‎, which translates to "the Israeli". Both of those literal translations are in the lead for their respective articles. Comparing the two without "to" or "the" beforehand (in Hebrew), you have יִשְׂרָאֵל vs ישראלי. The "י" at the start of the second word (technically end of the second word in Hebrew) which is used by the Israeli Navy is what adds the "i" at the end. Back to what I said about regularization, English speakers assume that the "I" in IDF would be an adjective (Israeli), which would be consistent with the examples you gave of American Armed Forces and British Defence Forces but it's a noun instead (Israel). I think that makes it pretty clearly incorrect and not an alternative name. @Sdkb: Pinging the other involved editor. Thanks. Streetr4 (talk) 17:18, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for opening this talk page section, @Streetr4. Your analysis makes sense and I concur.

@Wbm1058, re "The Israel Defense Forces are the Israeli Defense Forces" is a perfectly fine descriptive sentence, as a professional copy editor I would not say that's a fine sentence. The issue is capitalization: Because the second part is descriptive, "defense forces" there would need to be lowercase. But this redirect is capitalized, which makes it incorrect rather than just the descriptive version of the name.

Lastly, a procedural thing: You have now reverted other editors tagging the redirect as incorrect three times. Because this has happened over an extended period I'm presuming you may have missed the history, but as it is a slow-motion edit war I'd ask you to self-revert regardless of whether or not you find the above arguments persuasive. Happy to continue discussing here, though, and I'm open to being persuaded myself if there are arguments you'd like to raise now that we have more room than we did in edit summaries. Cheers, Sdkb ^talk 17:33, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Regarding "American Armed Forces," I'd say that's WP:OTHERSTUFF; it doesn't appear to have any redirect tags currently.

And regarding bypassing the redirects, I'm not super familiar with the process of how that happens. But if it's grammatically appropriate to tag this as incorrect, it would be improper of us to refrain from doing so just to try to minimize a backlog. Sdkb ^talk 17:38, 5 June 2026 (UTC)

Your "consensus" is a local consensus based on a 2–1 vote, with, um, "original" arguments on the "incorrect" side which are not citing any applicable policies or guidelines.

I'm here because this redirect shows 500 incoming links at User:Wbm1058/Reports/Linked incorrect names, more than double the item with the second-most links, currently Works Project AdministrationWorks Project Administration.

I see you've been working on the Wikipedia:Essay directory. I usually don't pay much attention to essays, but, finding only one relevant essay in that directory, Wikipedia:Robotic editing, I just edited that essay to show you how you can help by efficiently making those 500 edits.

• Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowser (AWB) – downloadable desktop application for Windows
• Wikipedia:JavaScript Wiki Browser (JWB) – works similarly to AWB, but requires no executable installation, and runs on all major operating systems

I'm surprised that you hadn't heard of these tools yet. I cut my teeth on AWB years ago, but mostly use JWB now because, although it has a smaller feature set, it's sufficient for most of my semi-automated editing tasks. Category:Wikipedians who use Javascript Wiki Browser. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:19, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Your "consensus" is a local consensus based on a 2–1 vote We go with the prevailing local consensus in the absence of any broader input. I do not currently know of any broader input (either in terms of applicable PAG or in terms of a prior discussion), but I'll add {{Please see}} invites from Talk:Israel Defense Forces and WT:WikiProject Israel to attract some eyes.

I'm not sure what point you're making by citing the number of incoming links. Again, reducing the backlog in your report is not a valid reason to change an appropriate tag.

I've made about 20,000 edits via AWB, so I'm quite familiar with it, just not how editors use it specifically for redirect bypassing. It's not something I'd expect to be hard to figure out, but I just haven't ever gotten around to trying that particular task. Sdkb ^talk 16:39, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Give me a break. It's not necessary to have it make "general fixes". I tried that once, but found that slowed me down too much as then I was burdened with waiting for it to process them and then checking its work on that as well. You just use it the same way you would to make any other edit. Start with replace "Israeli Defense Forces" with "Israel Defense Forces". When edit preview shows an exception needing special handling, stop and add that exception to the rules. It's not that difficult. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:20, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Or just "skip edit" on the exceptions, and edit them manually later. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:22, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

My edit summary from April: common alternative name, per Google Ngram https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Israeli+Defense+Forces%2CIsrael+Defense+Forces&year_start=1950&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false

Search https://www.google.com/search?q=%22israeli%20defense%20forces%22&tbm=bks&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2018,cd_max:2022&lr=lang_en

You're telling me they got it wrong in English Wikipedia because of Hebrew grammar...

I suppose some would say to just lowercase it to Israeli defense forces then it would be tagged as an {{R from miscapitalisation}}. – wbm1058 (talk) 18:47, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Regardless of the Hebrew grammar, "Israel Defense Forces" is the official English name used by the Israeli military. I only mentioned the grammar in Hebrew because it's the reason it's "Israel" and not "Israeli" in the official translation. Streetr4 (talk) 19:42, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Alright already. The Israeli defense forces are a subsidiary of the United States Armed Forces (not the American Armed Forces) which is why "Israeli Defense Forces" is wrong. It's the United States' Israel Defense Forces. Seems you guys have no interest in helping and are just going to keep poking this until someone else does it. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:33, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by "no interest in helping". I only changed the redirect category and had no idea that a tool existed to fix links to incorrect names. That being said, I'll download the tool you linked to remove links to this redirect. Streetr4 (talk) 22:35, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

Your "other stuff" argument flies in the face of Wikipedia:Consistency in article titles. – wbm1058 (talk) 21:54, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

There. It's really not that hard. You can use WP:NAVPOPS to pipe links so as not to misquote someone using an incorrect name. Insert an {{sic}} there if necessary. Hopefully won't run afoul of WP:NOPIPE fixers. I don't know whether I'll have better luck convincing you to use that tool than I did Dicklyon. – wbm1058 (talk) 22:15, 8 June 2026 (UTC)

It looks like this has gone stale and is perhaps settled but I saw the notice at WT:RE. I find the arguments in favor of {{R from incorrect name}} persuasive. This does appear to be an error, albeit a common and understandable one, and it should be categorized as such and removed from article space. —Myceteae‍🌈 (talk) 23:01, 13 June 2026 (UTC)

The issue does seem to be settled. I've removed most links to this redirect and replaced them with direct links to Israel Defense Forces. I left some links on pages where the link was apart of a quote or used in a way where it was unclear if it should be changed, I'll review those later. Streetr4 (talk) 02:41, 14 June 2026 (UTC)