I'm thinking we may move this fellow to his historical name of Crown Prince Wilhelm to avoid hit and runs.
We should probably also link him to the incorrect names HT gave him, since people who come here will probably looking for him that way. TR 20:28, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
You mean with a one paragraph bio on OTL Crown Prince at the beginning? Makes sense. ML4E 03:20, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
An intro bio would be a good idea. Moving the article altogether--That's pushing the integrity of the project a bit too far, methinks. Turtle Fan 03:57, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Epic failure[]
HT either knows something we don't or he just failed spectacularly with this guy. (And since HT never actually gives us the Kaiser's name in any other volume of SA, I presume the latter).
He couldn't have been Friedrich I. Frederick III was his grandfather (last I looked Friedrich=Frederick). So if he were really Friedrich, he would have been Friedrich IV.
He could have been Friedrich Wilhelm V of Prussia, but it didn't appear as if the Hohenzollerns were in the habit of changing their names for their Prussian reign.
As we've noted elsewhere, while his given name was Friedrich Wilhelm, he was always known as Crown Prince Wilhelm. It's not unheard of for rulers to change their name during their reign (see George VI of the United Kingdom), I don't think it common that they restart the numbering. TR 23:38, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
- Don't look at me, I'm as stumped as you are. It seems to me that at one point I found a second or third son by the name of the emperor, but it also seems to me that was the A-H King-Emperor in GWII, whose name escapes me altogether. Turtle Fan 00:23, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Great War Paragraph[]
I have no recollection of anything in the paragraph on his GWI career. That by itself doesn't mean so much; GW was a lot of years ago and my recall is imperfect. But given the level of detail on the European war that was available in the books, this section is suspiciously extensive and specific. It reads something like the stuff we used to write back before we started discouraging speculation. Turtle Fan 16:15, August 1, 2010 (UTC)
- It appears to have been a certain amount of OTL mixed in with ATL. I removed it. TR 16:46, August 1, 2010 (UTC)
- Ah, good. Turtle Fan 18:31, August 1, 2010 (UTC)
Curious Notions article[]
I don't have clearance to edit this page, but I think this would do for a CN article for W3 with in-universe verisimilitude. "Wilhelm III succeeded his father Wilhelm II as Kaiser, and reigned for ten years of relative peace. He was succeeded by his son Wilhelm IV, who resumed Wilhelm II's policies of imperialistic conquest. Literary comment: This is a bit speculative, as Wilhelm III is never mentioned in the text. However, the mentions of both Wilhelm II and Wilhelm IV indicate that a Wilhelm III did reign at some point. Based on OTL and POD clues, there's no reason to think that Wilhelm III was not the historical Crown Prince Wilhelm."JonathanMarkoff (talk) 23:49, November 4, 2015 (UTC)
Protection?[]
This page is protected for some reason. So is Wilhelm I.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 23:02, November 13, 2015 (UTC)
- Very early in this project's history we had a lot of people come in, read an article about a given historical figure, proclaim the information "wrong" and edit accordingly. In the early going, we did not include the info section, or the elaborate templating systems, so these people assumed they'd found some elaborate vandalism. We began protecting the historical figures out of hand. With inclusion of OTL sections and templates, most of these issues have gone away. TR (talk) 00:36, November 14, 2015 (UTC)
Wilhelm Redirects[]
For the Crown Prince we have the following redirects:
- [[Wilhelm III]] which was originally the result of a rename to
- [[Wilhelm III of Germany]]which was renamed to "Crown Prince ..."
Both are now redirects to the Southern Victory sub-section.
We also have:
- [[Wilhelm I]] a redirect to "Wilhelm I, German Emperor", a result of two renames.
- Wilhelm I (Southern Victory) a redirect to the Southern Victory subsection.
- [[Wilhelm II]] a redirect to "Wilhelm II, German Emperor", also a result of two renames.
- [[Wilhelm II of Germany]] also a redirect to "Wilhelm II, German Emperor", the result of one rename.
- three other redirects (Curious Notions), (Southern Victory) and Uncle Alf) for the respective stories.
- [[Wilhelm IV]] a redirect to "Prince Wilhelm of Prussia", a result of two renames and then a edit for "Curious Notions" sub-section.
- Wilhelm IV of Germany a redirect and then again a specific edit.
Which of these do we want to keep? I recommend that, at the least, "Wilhelm III (Southern Victory) and "Wilhelm IV (Curious Notions)" replace each of the other two redirects but am unsure about the rest. ML4E (talk) 15:59, May 16, 2016 (UTC)
< bump > ML4E (talk) 17:32, May 17, 2016 (UTC)
- We've previously argued for the deletion of the short redirects, so I think we dump "Wilhelm I", "Wilhelm II", "Wilhelm III" and "Wilhelm IV" in keeping with previous positions. Since Wilhelm III is unique to 191 and Wilhelm IV is unique to CN, I think we can just keep "Wilhelm III of Germany" and "Wilhelm IV of Germany" and dump their more story specific redirects. We did that with Charles XI of France. TR (talk) 18:58, May 17, 2016 (UTC)
- He's called Wilhelm III in the Curious Notions list too.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:02, May 17, 2016 (UTC)
- Yesterday I deleted the "Wilhelm IV of Germany" redirect because the only place it was used was this Talk Page. However, I reread TR's comments above and realized its the "Wilhelm IV" redirect that needed deleting but the existing redirects hadn't been changed. I did so now, restored the longer redirect name and deleted the shorter one. ML4E (talk) 19:46, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
Hist ref in TWTCE[]
In either Two Fronts or Last Orders, Arno Baatz reflects on how, if Germany hadn't screwed up in WWI, Wilhelm II would still be Kaiser, then he thinks, no it would be his son now. This indicates that W2 died on schedule in TWTCE, and could justify a Crown Prince Wilhelm section on the hist refs page.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 00:01, November 15, 2016 (UTC)
Authoritarian act of moving Wilhelm III to Friedrich Wilhelm V[]
I reviewed some of our explanations for why we went with Wilhelm III, and I realized that we spent an inordinate amount of time to try to "correct" an error, which we usually avoid doing. I went back and looked at the books, and HT uses "Friedrich Wilhelm" frequently enough that it is as close to "canon" as an inconsistency can get. So I made the authoritarian move to officially call him "Friedrich Wilhelm" with the redirects to the Inconsistencies page. 18:06, 2 April 2022 (UTC)
- Sounds fine. Turtle Fan (talk) 14:17, 4 April 2022 (UTC)
- Another possibility is to treat Friedrich Wilhelm V as a butterfly descendant like Jeb Stuart Jr., Daniel MacArthur, Charles W. La Follette, and Charles XI of France - a fictional analog of Crown Prince Wilhelm, with a separate article. 191 is HT's most butterfly-analog-heavy timeline.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 05:04, 5 April 2022 (UTC)
- We still have Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, Hirohito, Emperor Showa, and Charles I of Austria. Butterflies appear to have affected the Crown Prince's naming choices, but we have no reason to think they interfered with Hohenzollern genetics.
- I'm sure that Wikipedia would also have provided the correct age for Jeb Jr.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 06:40, 6 April 2022 (UTC)
- In the afterword of Salamis, he does talk about how night-and-day the writing process was, having easy access to a mature Internet versus the first four books in the series when he had to dig around in a research library for every little thing that he didn't already know offhand. And he started that series around the same time he was writing VO. Turtle Fan (talk) 14:16, 6 April 2022 (UTC)