Editorial policy
How the Field Dispatch is written, sourced and corrected.
One author, open about his tools
The Field Dispatch is written by Maksymilian Mogielnicki, a self-taught military history enthusiast from Poland, not a professional historian. AI tools help him edit, translate between English and Polish and check the texts. He reviews the sources and decides what is published, and he answers for every page.
Every paragraph names its sources
Each paragraph of an article ends in a numbered note. The note names the works that paragraph draws on, and every work is listed in full under Sources at the end of the page, with a link where one exists, so you can check any claim yourself.
We draw on published histories, museums, archives and established encyclopedias. Where they disagree, we say so and name who says what.
No invented figures
We never invent statistics. Strengths and losses in old battles are estimates, so we give them as ranges or as estimates and name the source of each figure. Where no reliable figure exists, we say that instead of guessing.
Our criteria are on the page
Our ranking lists publish the criteria and the scores behind the order. In our comparison pages, such as Grant vs Lee, the verdict is our opinion, and we say so on the page.
Free to use, always credited
Every image on the site is in the public domain or under a free licence (CC0 or Creative Commons Attribution), and each one is credited under the picture with its author and licence where the licence asks for it. Locator maps are drawn by us from Natural Earth data, which is in the public domain.
What “Updated” means
The “Updated” date on an article changes when its text changes, not when we only touch the code of the page.
Tell us and we fix it
Found an error? Write to [email protected]. We check it against the sources, correct the page and update its date.