Contribute

This wiki is meant to be edited. Change a soldier page the same way you would edit Wikipedia: the infobox holds the structured facts, and the rest of the article is freeform. You do not need an account to edit text.

Class-roster terms, National Archives sources, Classes 1–31 roster attribution (Camp Ritchie Museum digitization), and research-notes confidence are on About the data. Research notes on soldier pages may be unverified; replace a bad note with a sourced sentence, or explain the change on the talk page. Families looking for a relative: start at Start here.

Add a photo to a relative’s page

Most families only need these steps:

1. Find the soldier by surname or ASN (titles look like Surname, First (ASN)).
2. Create an account or log in (required for uploads only).
3. On the soldier page, scroll to Gallery.
4. In Contribute files, choose the image, keep Gallery checked, and check Use as profile photo only if it is a clear portrait of that person.
5. In the upload summary (or under Sources on the page), note where the photo came from (family album, newspaper, NARA, and so on).

Do not upload files you do not have permission to share. Full upload options and document OCR are below.

Editing

• Anyone can edit or create articles, including while logged out. Use the Edit tab for biography text (visual editor), or Edit source for the full page markup.
• On soldier pages, use Edit soldier facts above the infobox for structured fields (dates, class, teams, nativity) without touching wiki markup.
• Every revision is kept. Bad changes are rolled back from Special:RecentChanges.
• An account is optional for text. It is only needed if you want to upload a photograph.

Three ways to edit a soldier page

1. Edit soldier facts — form above the infobox for birth/death years, class, teams, nativity, occupation, and similar fields. Safest for corrections to roster data.
2. Edit biography (or the Edit tab) — visual editor for the Biography section, research notes, and sources. Works like Wikipedia.
3. Edit source — full wiki markup, including the {{Soldier}} template. For experienced editors only.

Opening summary

On a soldier page, Draft opening summary builds a short 5–10 sentence opening from Personal details in the infobox and the Biography section. It does not use research notes or military-service fields. It does not run by itself. Review the draft, edit it, then Use this summary to replace the opening paragraph. If an AI key is configured on the server, the draft can use that; otherwise it is assembled only from those fields. Do not keep a sentence unless you believe it is supported.

What to add

• Biographies, family recollections, and unit stories, with sources when you have them
• Photographs (see below)
• Corrections to name, ASN, class, dates, or death year
• External links to NARA, Find a Grave, newspapers, or published histories

Sources and confidence

• Yellow Record status: unconfirmed banners mean the class-roster match is not high confidence — check those fields before treating them as fact
• Keep baseline sources under Sources (roster, NARA, census) and add newspapers, books, or archives when you expand the biography
• Mark an unsourced claim with {{Needs source}} (links to the talk page)
• Prefer a sourced correction over silently deleting a research note; use Talk when two sources disagree

Photographs and documents

You can upload from each soldier page (Gallery section) or from Special:Upload.

OCR a document (review before save) — enrich a soldier profile from a scan (not the usual family photo path):

• On a soldier page: in Contribute files under Gallery, use OCR a document to enrich this profile — OCR proposes infobox facts and a short biography draft; Apply is explicit (reviewers/admins).
• Site-wide inbox: Contribute documents (same enrich flow; multi-person team rosters supported).
• Handwriting / hard scans still start with free local OCR; paid LLM vision runs only when that preliminary score is weak (`RITCHIE_LLM_API_KEY`). Clear printed forms stay on local OCR.
• Nothing from OCR is written automatically; Apply is explicit.

On the soldier page (Gallery section)

1. Log in, open the soldier's page, scroll to Gallery
2. In Contribute files: pick a file, choose profile photo and/or Gallery, click Upload file

Profile photos (infobox portrait)

1. Images: leave Use as profile photo checked only for a confirmed portrait of that individual
2. Matching filenames like Firstname surname.jpg also appear automatically without uploading again

Other files (PDFs, letters, scans)

1. PDF, Word, plain text, and TIFF uploads are allowed (on the soldier page or Special:Upload)
2. Documents go to the Gallery section, not the infobox

For any upload, state the source and copyright in the upload summary when using Special:Upload. Deleting a file requires an administrator account.

New topic pages

If you add a page that is not a soldier biography (history, interviews, FAQ, and similar), put [[Category:Ritchie Boys Wiki]] at the bottom. It will then appear under Contents in the Site pages list (same multi-column layout as Category:Classes). Soldier pages are indexed A–Z from the infobox and do not need that category.

For other directory-style lists on a page, prefer {{#categorytree:CategoryName|mode=pages|hideroot=on|showcount=on}} (or mode=categories). Site CSS lays those trees out in three columns automatically.

Site changelog

Feature-level changes to the wiki (new tools, layouts, import systems) are listed on Site changelog, newest first. That page is not a substitute for Special:RecentChanges (which shows every article edit).

Infobox fields

Each soldier page is laid out like a Wikipedia biography: a short opening paragraph on the left and a right-hand infobox (portrait, personal details, military service). The opening paragraph starts from the infobox facts. You can edit it in the visual editor like any other sentence. Changing infobox fields with Edit soldier facts updates that paragraph unless you have already rewritten it.

Edit the {{Soldier}} template call at the top of the page. Class numbers for men who attended more than one class are separated by a semicolon, for example 5;11. That keeps Category:Class 5 and similar roster pages in sync.

If you change class or nativity, the categories on that page update from the infobox the next time the page is saved. Add a longer narrative under Biography.

Talk pages

Use the article's Talk page when two sources disagree, or when a match looks wrong. Do not silently delete a baseline field unless you have a source; strike or note the old value on Talk.

What not to publish

• Social Security numbers or other modern identity numbers
• Private contact information for living relatives (street addresses, phone numbers, email)
• Unsourced accusations of crime

To request removal of private information, see About or Contact Us.

For administrators

See Patrol for rollback, blocks, protection, and upload abuse. Watch Special:RecentChanges daily when the wiki is public.