Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Maintaining an article

If you have been contributing to Wikipedia for some time, the chances are that you have already discovered your niche—that is, self-identification of areas in which you have an interest and feel comfortable editing. As your knowledge grows and you begin to take an active role in making sure that articles in your niche remain accurate and up to date, it's possible that over time you will become the articles' primary maintainer.

Maintaining one or more articles is a long term commitment. It entails regular visits—perhaps even more than once a day on high-traffic articles—to ensure that the content remains well sourced and well cited, and also free from vandalism, fringe theories, edit warring and other detrimental edits that, if left unchecked, will result in an article's slow collapse. Article maintainers normally make sure any changes to the subject matter are reflected in the article, keeping it up to date. Lastly, those maintaining articles holding a criteria-based quality rating (such as GA, A, or FA-class) usually ensure that the articles remain current with the often-shifting standards of these assessments.

Article maintenance is good for Wikipedia for the simple reason that article maintainers are often very familiar with both the information in the articles and the sources used to write them. However, there is a downside: overzealous maintenance can create problems that, in the worse case scenario, may result in your being banned from Wikipedia. It is important to understand where the line between maintaining an article and being possessive lies, and how to balance your interest in a way that allows all editors to contribute to the articles in your care.

Maintenance vs ownership

You do not own articles (nor templates and other features of Wikipedia). If you create or edit an article, know that others will edit it, and within reason you should not prevent them from doing so. —Wikipedia:Ownership of articles

The first thing to appreciate about maintaining an article is that no-one on this site 'owns' any of the articles. This is explained in full at the page Wikipedia:Ownership of articles. In simple terms, if you wish to maintain an article you must also accept that others will edit the page. Unless the edits are obvious vandalism, each edit should be viewed as a good faith attempt to improve the article. To avoid the appearance of ownership you should consider the following before taking action to remove/alter newly added information or re-add subtracted information:

• Check if the new edit is really necessary to the article. If it has introduced additional information that does not appear vital or would be better off in another article, you should consider moving it before you consider deleting it. If the article is B-class or better and the edit appears valid but does not have a source (or is cited to an unreliable source), consider moving it to the talk page with an explanatory note until a reliable source can be located. Similarly, removed material may have been poorly-cited or irrelevant and the article may be better for its absence, but if you believe its removal is mistaken you should consider posting it to the talk page for further discussion rather than re-adding it to the article.

• Consider the edit in the light of both the site-wide Manual of Style and our milhist Manual of Style. Matters like over-linking and "In popular culture" are dealt with in the Manuals of Style, and these—while not the last words on article edits—carry significant weight with the community at large.

• Look for any established consensus from previous discussions. In some cases editors will have discussed at length a course of action to be taken in the event of certain types of edit. Some high-traffic articles may have the general gist of the question and its answer in a specially created FAQ template located at the top of the article talk page, while other articles may have hidden notes in a specific section of the edit view outlining an appropriate response.

• Have there been any relevant discussions elsewhere on Wikipedia? Sometimes elements of an article—perhaps a category link, an image, or controversial biographical information—are removed as a result of a discussion that did not take place on the article talk page. Standard practice when making such edits is to leave an edit summary with a link back to the relevant discussion, but this is sometimes omitted. Material that has been removed by editor consensus should not be re-added to the article.

• Keep in mind that the threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is "verifiability, not truth"—that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true. If information added to an article seems odd, but has a reliable source, it should be permitted to remain unless there is a compelling reason to remove it. If you believe the nature of the edit may conflict with other Wikipedia policies, such as assigning undue weight to a minority view, take your concerns to the article talk page.

If a change made to a page you are maintaining does not appear to conflict with the above points, then it's best to leave it alone unless you have a good reason for challenging it. The alternative is to end up in conflict with our ownership policy; especially if it appears that you are reverting every effort to build or improve an article.

Consensus for inclusion/exclusion

Articles on Wikipedia are created collaboratively by editors who have different perspectives, access to different sources, and different writing and reasoning styles. To achieve a neutral point of view under such conditions, editors must be willing to take discussions about article content seriously, listening to and evaluating a variety of viewpoints and concerns with due deliberation. On Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia Foundation projects) this is the purpose of consensus. —Wikipedia:Consensus, What Consensus is

If material that you have added or removed continues to reappear in an article then you may need to establish consensus with other editors as to a proper course of action to handle the material in question. Consensus on Wikipedia is about how our editors work with others, and it serves as a fundamental model for decision making. By inviting a wide spectrum of people to weigh in on a matter you can better gauge where the general mood and feeling for the inclusion or exclusion of certain material lies.

Establishing consensus starts with a realization that certain aspects of an article need clarification. These aspects can vary considerably from one article to another, but may include anything from belligerents and flag icons to paragraphs and the aftermath of situations covered in an article. Frequently the additions or removals of the information are undone, which leads to a situation in which editors stay away from article because anything added to it gets reverted. Once you have identified a need to gain consensus for a certain scenario you will need to initiate a discussion on the problem and the proposed solution(s), if any, and invite those involved in the dispute to weigh in on the matter. These discussions usually occur on talk page of the article in question, although they have in the past occurred on both the main Military history Project talk page or the talk page of the task force whose scope is closest to the article in question.

Depending on the article and the level of controversy surrounding the edits in question establishing consensus on a course of action can take very little time (in some cases, a week or so) to a very long time (a month or more). Although the process can be time consuming, the benefit to establishing consensus for a course of action is that the agreement by all editors to adhere to a specific course of action allows for a much more rapid evaluation of whether the added or remove material should be in the article. Additionally, by working with the community to establish a common practice for dealing with the inclusion or exclusion of material in an article, you avoid any claim of ownership to the article.

Maintaining an Article

Maintaining an article is very much like Adopting a Highway: you do not own the road, nor you can not stop vehicles from using the road, but you can make sure that the scenery out the window stays presentable for those traveling down the road

Until 2015, certain talk pages for articles on Wikipedia could occasionally be seen to sport a "maintained template" which listed one or more users in good standing who officially maintained the article in question. These users were usually responsible for pushing an article to GA, A, or FA-class, or for adding the inline citations to the article, and as such they may have added the maintained template as a way of showing others that they have both a strong knowledge of the topic or its sources, and have thoroughly read, understood, and checked the information in the article against sources. With the advent of working groups for the Military history Project, some of those maintained templates also listed the working group to which they belong in addition to the user or users who maintained the article so as to allow access to a broader range of assistance. In the aftermath of a deletion discussion for the template, it was decided that the use of the maintained template violated the spirit of the ownership guidelines at it, and was subsequently removed from all articles it was used on and deleted.

Although the maintained template is no longer in use, those articles holding GA, A, or FA-Class make use of a history template that lists the user most responsible for guiding an article to quality content level. Since this template shows who was responsible for the article's GA, A, or FA-Class nomination its possible for the community to look at information and sourcing you added to an article to improve its rating. Occasionally, community members may leave questions for editor who got the article to GA, A, or FA-Class; and if you were the one who helped the article reach one of those three ratings then you may be asked to lend perspective on the article with regards to information and sourcing. Therefore, you should be prepared to answer questions that arise on the talk page, and you should also be prepared to serve as a mediator between parties if disputes arise in the article.