Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Featured picture workflow

Dealing with Military History featured pictures essentially breaks down to three tasks, two of them very important, one much less so.

Task 1: How to maintain Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Showcase/FP

First of all, check the history tab to get some idea how far back one needs to look. If it is currently, say, September 23, and was last updated on, say, September 13, then August 3 before that, and both updates are significant (ignore things like typo fixes), it may be worth skimming over entries from August 3 to September 13, but the entries between September 13 and the present need a much more careful check.

So, there's two places you can review the entries. Probably easiest is the archive at Wikipedia:Featured pictures thumbs, which gives a short gallery with descriptions, in reverse chronological order. Note that, when the gallery gets full, a new one is started, so you might need to go back to the previous gallery sometimes. There aren't links to articles on that page, but clicking on the image (provided MediaViewer is turned off) leads to the file description page, with links to to all the articles the image appears in. Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Showcase/FP lists the images in alphabetical order by file name, so once you start finding the entries are already in the list, you can stop checking.

Ignoring the very obvious (photographs of weapons, battle scenes, and such), images to take particular care with checking are:

• Portraits: While you can ignore a photograph of, say, Lady Gaga, otherwise, always skim the biographies connected to all photographs of people: many of our best photographs of military heroes are in civilian outfits, and far more people than you'd think had a significant

military connection, particularly during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century, when there were plenty of wars to get involved in. As well, one should generally include the leaders of nations at war under the banner of MILHIST.

• Buildings: Remember that most castles will count as part of our military history. Sure, there's a few that were more stately homes with turrets because they're pretty, but those are the exceptions, not the general rule. Use your judgement on everything else, but if you aren't sure, check the article.
• Paintings: Photographs started to come in around the mid-19th century, and didn't become common for a while after that. Before that, we're using paintings and other art. However, don't include paintings of mythology, or scenes that merely happen to contain (unnamed, probably not real) soldiers, unless they're being used to illustrate weapons or armour. However, I think everyone expects paintings of battles not to be a perfect rendition of the scene, taking a few artistic liberties,

It's essentially impossible to remake the list, so it's important that whenever you do update it, you do your best to make sure everything that should be included is, because we cannot easily go back and fix mistakes.