Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Strategy/Self-assessment

Self-assessment

This subpage is created to facilitate self-evaluation by members of the WikiProject Military history. The purpose is to identify what works and does not work for community groups on Wikimedia Foundation projects, to help promote good practices across projects. It is also intended to help brainstorm ways for community groups to reach out to new users interested in their areas, to help encourage growth for Wikipedia. I will be presenting information gathered from this conversation to the Wikimedia Foundation, both to help provide guidelines to other projects and to see if there is anything the Foundation can do to better facilitate your work. Your contribution here is very much appreciated. Brainstorming is very welcome here, as it may be helpful to generate a kind of consensus view of the issues as well as to note individual opinions. Please feel free to add your answers below. Thanks! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:07, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

What does this project do well?

What are some of the best examples of this project's successes? This space is for exploring what your project does well--whether those successes are innovative (coming up with new ideas or approaches) or simply examples of successfully following through on established practices.

• In my experience, the project's greatest strength is that it provides a supportive environment for editors. This is mainly done through setting good examples of article content and editor conduct, but also includes the multiple ways in which editors can receive feedback on articles and the very active project talk page WT:MILHIST. We also work pretty well with our main 'sister' projects such as WP:AIR and WP:SHIPS. The availability of experienced editors to provide feedback and help sort out problems is also important (the coordinators are obviously very important in this regards - and have always done a great job both representing the project and acting as a point of contact [disclaimer: I was a coord for two years] - but lots of other editors have similar levels of experience and a willingness to donate their time to helping out). Some of this is actually quite simple - I'd highlight the B class assessment process which is run through Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Requests as being a remarkable success, as it has provided a way for editors to get an initial assessment of their article and encourages them to aim for the B class criteria when writing. Nick-D (talk) 03:27, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

• Related to Nick's comments, I'd say the project is generally good at recognising and making use of hard work, ability and commitment. Some of this is evidenced through our system of awards; it's satisfying to see the appreciative surprise when, for example, we make an A-Class award to someone who thought their efforts had gone largely unnoticed. It's also been very rewarding to see new, sometimes quite young, editors join Wikipedia, join the project, learn the ropes, and with the support Nick talks about take articles through GA, A-Class and FA, perhaps stand for project coordinatorship, and eventually pass the torch on to others as highly respected contributors in their own right. There always seems to be a pool of talent that can be drawn upon whether for article writing and reviewing, technical assistance, or when it comes to suggesting editors to be approached for standing in the next project elections. I believe at least part of the reason for this is the welcoming, friendly and collaborative atmosphere we strive to create. I've never encountered any exclusivity or cliquishness; citing the coordination team again as an example, I'd never even posted to the milhist talkpage when I was approached about helping out, and (if they'll forgive me for saying so!) some of our current coords are not editors one might regard as milhist-affiliated. While the purely altruistic goal of helping to build the world's largest on-line encyclopedia is something I personally subscribe to, I think it does no harm to recognise too that we're all human and enjoy the respect of our peers and the fulfilment of ambition even in this virtual environment. I suppose what I'm getting at is that in my view the project functions as a benevolent meritocracy in that it manages to provide a supportive environment where editors can make the most of themselves and get rewarded for doing so. Disclaimer: I'm far from the most active editor and coordinator, so in the above I'm praising the contributions of others much more worthy than myself :) EyeSerene^talk 14:18, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

• As much as I hate to say this, one of the reasons the project does so well is that there is no shortage of combat related material to edit. In the entire recorded history of humanity there has only been something like 100 years of total peace, so we've got no limit to the amount of material that editors can choose to work on. Another factor in or ongoing success to date has been the ability of the project to strike a tentative balance between the desire of our editors to work on material as they see fit and the bureaucracy needed to ensure the project's articles, lists, and so forth are overseen effectively. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• I think this project has always done well on the innovation front, particularly when that innovation relates to the improvement of articles. Many innovations that this project has developed have become the norm for the majority of the projects. The newsletter was one of the first and the innovations of our project structure and review processes have all been imitated wikipedia-wide. From what I can remember we were one of the first, if not the first, to introduce the B-Class criteria to our project. This gave everyone an achievable and quantifiable target and it then feeds into the other review processes which MILHIST does so well. The active A-Class assessment process has been a particular achievement of the project. It has acted as a feeder to the featured content processes for a long time now and I think that receiving those reviews has helped articles through FA/FL and that is an achievement in itself. I think one of the project's biggest successes is that we encourage the development and improvement of articles within a collegial atmosphere. The MILHIST talk page is always active and always full of people watching that are able and willing to help out with any number of tasks. It is that atmosphere that allows anyone to chip in and help that is one of our biggest successes in my opinion. Woody (talk) 10:48, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• I was thinking about what this project does well while going through our articles under review today, and I've come to the conclusion that what we have here can't easily be bottled and exported to other projects. What we have is a bunch of people who are good enough at what they do that they are willing to subject themselves and their articles to criticism, who are secure enough in their friendships and their competence that they don't feel a need to respond to every perceived mistake and injustice (of which there are plenty). There are a few people who submit articles for review with the same mistakes they had in the last 10 articles they submitted for review, and I love the fact that no one here treats these mistakes as an "opportunity" to prove that they know so much more than the nominators. I can almost see reviewers shaking their heads while they hand out the same advice as before, and don't take it personally when people don't do what they want them to. - Dank (push to talk) 15:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I would actually agree with this. MilHist seems to have a very balanced group of what I'd call senior editors who are working on things that they very much enjoy. It's got an almost academic feel about it, which contributes to a very professional feel. The exchanges I've seen are closer to what I've seen in peer-reviewed academic journal article development, which is a good thing.Intothatdarkness (talk) 15:11, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• Dan makes a good point. What drew me into MilHist was the internal review processes, particularly A-Class, which provide great fora for constructive criticism without the high stakes of FAC. That's why I still bring articles there, even when I'm fairly confident they'd succeed at FAC. We have a great core of experienced editors with hugely diverse backgrounds and we all bring our own experiences and knowledge to the project. It makes the project feel very collegial, and the members are usually happy to do one another a favour. For example, some people must be getting sick of all the articles on British generals I keep churning out, but they review them anyway and since everyone here has some interest in military history, we have collective expertise for reviewing military history articles greater than that elsewhere on WP. There's also a lot of informal dispute resolution and collaboration that goes on at the main project talk page. It all gives editors a sense of "belonging", which makes them happy, and thus more productive. I disagree with Dan that it can't be exported though. If another project had a similar number of experienced, dedicated and charismatic at the helm as MilHist has, and a sufficiently broad subject area, it could be just as successful. MilHist as it today, though, is the product of years of work, so it couldn't be replicated immediately in another project. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I'm open to suggestions on a better way to put it; I'm trying to say that I don't think you can copy the same rules we have to another project and expect the same results unless you already have a core of people with similar values. - Dank (push to talk) 15:51, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
    • I think you're right there. If you had a few dozen experienced and respected editors at the core and a broad enough scope that enough people would be interested and there's enough to write about, it could work, but it certainly wouldn't happen overnight. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:15, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
      • Indeed, it's not an overnight process. At the same time, it's worth keeping in mind that this project didn't start out with either a core of experienced editors or the scope it currently has; the original WikiProject Battles had only a handful of regular editors—many of them quite new—and a relatively narrow scope.

        My gut feeling—and this is, admittedly, based more on general observation than any hard data—is that, while the project's current state isn't something that can be "transplanted" directly, the general process by which we grew is probably something that could be copied by other projects. Not every project can follow the same path, of course—as you say, a certain breadth of scope is necessary for a project to succeed (at least in the model we currently use) and some projects are simply too narrow or too broad to use our approach—but I think the overall approach is viable for projects in our size category. Kirill ^{[talk] [prof]} 16:58, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

        • I think WikiProject Battles was perhaps fortunate in its regular editors and in having a scope that allowed for scaling and the possibility of expansion, which happened in due course :) Like other respondents above I'd put milhist's (and any other) project's success down to having a committed group of editors at the helm at the outset who are in it for the mid- to long-term, and building a critical mass of active membership. I'd also add that the project "leadership" (I don't really like that term because it's not what milhist coords do) must be prepared to mentor editors with at least half an eye on effectively doing themselves out of a job. I believe this is especially important given the typically short lifecycle and high turnover of online communities; continuity can only be assured by developing a qualified and willing pool of people ready to assume the mantle from the old guard, and by the old guard being willing to make way for them. Finally (at the risk of bringing up the "E" word), I think we have to constantly examine ourselves to make sure we're meeting our primary purpose of building an encyclopedia. EyeSerene^talk 18:16, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• I have found MilHist to be an island of sanity. I did not realise how much until recently. This is not the reason I came to the project though; I came because I was a military historian. And the MilHist articles are fairly good reputation in academic circles. I think that both are mainly due to a relatively small number of editors. What the project does particularly well is its internal reviews, the peer and the A-class reviews. When I try to get a non-MilHist article reviewed (or a MilHist article reviewed by a wider audience), I rarely have much luck. The project should probably conduct its own FAC reviews as well. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:48, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Yes, the lack of drama is a real feature of this project. I suspect that the editors here are much older (or at least more mature) than in most other parts of Wikipedia. Nick-D (talk) 10:26, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
    • I fully concur with the above from Hawkeye and Nick. It would be interesting to verify that age thing, though I suspect that it's right. It's also true of course that of those editors we know are quite young (early to mid teens) when they arrive, they've often shown a very high degree of maturity in comparison to that I've encountered elsewhere from editors of a similar age. EyeSerene^talk 12:31, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Teamwork and constructive communication

You guys have given some tremendous feedback here, and I very much appreciate it. :) I'm going to be working to create a "nutshell" overview of this and subsequent sections, from which I may draw more questions.

A universal theme I see here is a belief that the members of the project are willing to work for and with one another, offering feedback or assistance where needed and accepting feedback and assistance from others, even newcomers. The working environment here is low drama, probably because of the maturity levels of its participants; the willingness of all involved to focus on issues without personalizing them keeps the atmosphere collegial and professional. On a few particulars, Nick-D believes that the project takes its ability to collaborate internally into relationships with related projects as well, Woody thinks the project has been innovative within its own structures (with newsletters and class criteria), and Hawkeye7 finds it helpful that the project has maintained a manageable size.

It seems to be generally agreed that the project is good at motivation. User:EyeSerene mentions the recognition provided for achievement. A number of you talk about the value of the assessment processes and how these both draw in contributors who want feedback and encourage article improvement. It seems that some dedicated and charismatic helmsmen may have contributed to the success of the project by reaching out to new contributors and mentoring them to take on new responsibilities within the group, making way for them to do so. The willingness of the project members to work on what needs doing as well as what they want to do is a major factor.

The abundance of material to cover doesn't hurt. :)

Would you all pretty much agree with this view? Have I misunderstood or missed anything? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:21, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, that seems right. The 'virtuous circle' effect is probably worth emphasising; helpful conduct has encouraged further helpful conduct. Nick-D (talk) 06:44, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

From what I've seen, this WikiProject has a core of dedicated editors, they welcome and evaluate articles by newcomers with the same standards that they apply to veteran project members (sorry if this redundant). There is no favoritism shown and editors take recommendations for improvement as good-faith advice rather than an offensive attack. Discussions are sincere and participants are mature. Requests for assessment are fulfilled in a timely manner (instead of languishing on a project page for months). I'm hoping to see some of these values and practices in other projects I work with, someday. Boneyard90 (talk) 23:22, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

What challenges face your project?

In your opinion, what are the greatest challenges that your project faces or has faced in succeeding on Wikipedia? These challenges can be issues that you have overcome or issues that you are still facing.

• Remaining up to date with Wikipedia-wide changes to guidelines and practices is a constant challenge. For example, while this project has a very good record in preparing articles for FA nominations, about once a year SandyGeorgia or one of her FA delegate colleagues turns up and points out that we're not covering off an important change to the FAC rules and the success rate has dropped as a result (most recently, this was in regards to close paraphrasing and spot checks of references). A few years ago there was a fair bit of hostility to the project (and some other Wikiprojects) on the grounds that it seen as being exclusive and aloof from some central areas of Wikipedia, but this seems to have turned around and we're now often identified as being best practice in many regards - I suspect that the steady stream of FAs and military history editors branching out into the central areas of Wikipedia has helped with this. As with all areas of Wikipedia, blind spots and certain biases are a problem - for instance, the coverage of female involvement in militaries and warfare is pretty woeful and articles on contentious topics (such as Eastern European and East Asian wars and rivalries) are frequently a POV mess. On this topic, female involvement in the project as a whole is very low, and I suspect that it's much lower than the (very low) overall rate for Wikipedia. While military history is a 'blokey' topic, it's by no means exclusively male (just look at the visitors to any major military history museum, for instance) and we should be doing better in encouraging female editors. Nick-D (talk) 01:58, 10 July 2011 (UTC)
• IMO: Apathy. This is not just a problem for our project, its a wikipedia wide problem, and sadly I can not foresee an end to it. The project members are logging off, editors increasingly detach themselves from needed internal processes like article review, and the ever increasing number of policy and guideline issues make editing less like the enjoyable process it used to be and more like a quarterly review before shareholders in some major corporation. This, I think, is causing both veteran editors to log off and potential new editors to stay away. Its an issue that needs to be addressed, but I am not sure what can be done to help reverse this perception. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• A decrease in participation levels and as Nick says, not keeping up with the changes that are almost constant in the style and guideline pages. One of the key areas that has kept MILHIST successful and churning out excellent content is the review processes frequented by a wide range of different editors with different interests. We need to ensure that we keep encouraging new editors to help out and get involved in the review processes as well as making sure that more experienced editors don't burn-out. If we saw a decrease in participation at the review processes then I think the general sense of apathy could increase. Woody (talk) 10:56, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• In addition to the above, which I agree are the major threats to the project, there is still the threat from outside from editors who do not believe that MilHist is a suitable subject area for the Wikipedia, and that it should concentrate on sports, entertainment and popular culture. Hawkeye7 (talk) 02:52, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Flagging interest, growing complexity and/or evolving practices, uneven coverage, outside hostility

What I'm picking up from this:

One of the primary challenges facing your project is the same challenge facing other areas of Wikipedia: apathy. There's a need to keep old members engaged and new members coming, with a particular need to keep up those activities that engage new members, such as the review processes. It seems that your project has successfully weathered some problems with seeming separate and/or aloof, but needs to continue to keep in touch with Wikipedia-wide changes and to manage the increasing complexity of policy/guideline creep. In terms of content, there may be a need to increase coverage of areas that fall into blind spots and to neutralize articles on contentious topics that may be impacted by contributor bias. User:Hawkeye7 is concerned that military history topics may be devalued by those who consider Wikipedia's focus more appropriately on pop culture.

Again, please let me know if I've missed or misunderstood something. Feel free to expound on or argue any of the above. :) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:38, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

To the above I'd add that our subject coverage very much reflects our demographic. Western/Developed World/English-speaking areas are pretty strong, as one might expect, but there are huge subject areas that we are weak in. If I had to single out one concern, I believe that editing from the Indian subcontinent will present a growing challenge in the future. English is the lingua franca (heh) making en-WP the wiki of choice, and we lack quantities of experienced editors in that area (there are a few I can think of that do excellent work, but nothing like the breadth in other areas). I hope I can say this without offending anyone - no offence is intended - but historiography in the subcontinent seems to me to be at a stage where there's a desire to make it serve a nationalist and post-colonial agenda. This is perhaps understandable as the various nations emerge as powers in their own right, but I see it reflected in much of the editing I encounter in milhist articles, particularly those related to the British legacy and India/Pakistan relations. The West went through a similar stage post-WWII and its only now that some of the historiography is undergoing meta-analysis. Perhaps there has to be a certain minimum separation in time for these things to evolve, but I think until we start seeing native revisionist (and post-revisionist!) historians appearing in numbers in the subcontinent we'll be dealing with the same sorts of partisanship we've seen cause Wikipedia problems with the Balkans and elsewhere. I guess this relates back to those concerns expressed about how we deal with POV pushing, especially when most of us are unfamiliar with the nuances of the subjects involved. EyeSerene^talk 20:22, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry that I haven't had time lately to add to this, though I've scanned responses with interest. What particularly struck a chord above was Maggie highlighting the perceived appropriateness (or not) of WP's coverage of military history vs. pop culture, since what drew me to WP in the first place (and I still have it in my user page blurb somewhere) was its focus on pop culture. I spent my first year or so writing exclusively on music subjects (I'll take credit for most of the articles on David Bowie's classic '70s albums being reasonably well-written/cited...!) before switching to MilHist. My interest in military history was always as strong as my interest in music, film, etc, however early on I saw big holes in WP's coverage and quality of music articles; hell, before I came along around 2006 there were no articles on "Ashes to Ashes", "Heroes", or "All the Young Dudes" -- sacrilige! I daresay I felt also that an online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit" was more suitable for pop culture simply because history required much more serious and professional treatment. Upon further investigation I decided that there were plenty of gaps in MilHist's coverage of another area important to me, namely Australian military aviation, and that the best of MilHist's articles at the time were very creditable, hence my major change of focus in early 2007. For me, one of the major selling points of WP is that as long as something meets notability guidelines, it has a place. If people don't like military history, they don't have to read the articles... ;-) Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 16:11, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

I have mixed feelings about the pop culture issue. On the one hand it can obstruct our desire to be taken as a credible academic resource and to attract academics and professionals; on the other, it's perhaps the best reflection of Wikipedia's core values and strengths in that pop culture crosses national boundaries and language barriers and can be a vehicle for collaboration that more obscure 'academic' subjects can't. I have to admit that my first significant edits were rewrite and expansions of Parasite Eve II and Baccara... both involving editors from non-English speaking countries :) If I'd had poor experiences there, or hadn't initially been interested by those articles, maybe I'd never have moved on to other things. EyeSerene^talk 16:23, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

I, too, have mixed feelings on the matter of pop culture. Pop culture was what got me to Wikipedia in the first place, and I was the one who created and/or expanded most of the articles on or concerning the Mobile Suit Gundam universe - in particular, the Universal Century related pages - and I was one who expanded the Command & Conquer series pages, all in the belief that the material would help people who were looking for information on the series. Watching the better part of 90% of this material end up axed or merged and severely curtailed (in some case, whole pages condensed to two or three sentences in a list article) has been depressing. People keep saying that Wikipedia needs to lose the pop culture material if it is to be taken seriously but thats a pill that some people are unable or simply unwilling to swallow. Its also the reason why a good many of the projects that sprung up early in Wikipedia's history have folded. IMO, this is one of the major reasons that editors are leaving Wikipedia: the fiction and pop culture material that Wikipedia used to support is being exterminated from the site in much the same that the Jews were exterminated in WWII, and the editors that are desperate to save this material are moving it to other wikis so it can be safe. In the process of doing so, these editors radically reduce their editing activity here or simply leave Wikipedia all together. For our part, we allow such mentions if they can full fill a certain criteria, but other projects are not open to this idea at all. I suppose in some sense our pop culture criteria can be considered fair in that if one attempts to add a mention we weight its appearance by our criteria to determine if it should stay or go, and that may be one reason why we've retained members better than other projects. It needs to be understood that attempting to eliminate all instances of pop culture here would be impossible, so there must be a balance in which the material can exist as a necessary evil, however no one wants to sit down with the Wikipedia community as a whole and discuss this in a civilized manner. If general guidelines for pop culture and for that matter fiction could be penned that struck a fair balance between the public's desire to note pop culture and the sites need to ensure that the information meets citations and notability criteria then I suspect people would be more willing to come to the site, stay with the site, and work on article on the site. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:12, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Your Holocaust analogy made me blink Tom - a bit strong, perhaps? :) Regardless, I don't think it's a bad thing that we've lost those hundreds of in-universe trivial articles on minor Star Wars characters and I really dislike "In popular culture" sections in our articles, but you make a good point that maybe in some areas we're going too far down that road and losing editors in the process. Have you seen this happening in milhist-related areas too? My impression is that of course we have our trivia, but because it's technical trivia (things like obscure weapons systems that were designed but never manufactured) we perhaps 'get away' with it more than we would if we were writing about, say, video games. EyeSerene^talk 11:31, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I think I favor a "middle-road" approach to the pop-culture issue. It has its place, but long lists of video games, each with a 3-line description requiring knowledge of characters and storylines doesn't do anybody any good except the person who wrote it. It should be enough to say, "featured in many novels/films/video games, notably..." and list perhaps the first or best-known; that is, its mention should be justified somehow. I've done this with several articles in other projects, but then some vigilance is required, as occasionally some useless bit of trivia will be tacked on to the end of a paragraph. Boneyard90 (talk) 12:19, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

I actually find the pop culture stuff one of the weaknesses of Wikipedia, as the combination of that and some of the more pedantic tones you find about "notability" creates a very interesting (and at times amusing) contradiction. And that might boil down to the contradiction of Wiki itself. Within milhist I don't think we run into trivia any more than some of the Osprey books do. Could some of it be avoided? Sure. Could we also be more aware of historical community standards instead of trying to apply our own? Again, sure. But on the whole I think milhist is strong, and has a sense of community that will help it carry on in that manner.Intothatdarkness (talk) 13:31, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

A point of clarification concerning holocaust: the literal meaning of the word is consumed by fire, and prior to WWII it was used somewhat liberally. In applying it here in its WWII context what I aim to point out is that no one seems all that interested in saving the material even when it can be proved that the material is worth saving. Sadly, this kind of attitude is resulting in fiction and pop culture material being confined to extraordinarily limited areas of Wikipedia, and IMO it will not be long until the surviving lists are such are deemed non essential and afd'd. When that happens we are going to lose a lot of a people who will go elsewhere for the information they are looking for, and as a result I think our readership and participation levels will go down. In the long run, that will be bad for everyone here. TomStar81 (Talk) 01:12, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

That's been happening for a number of years, hence the growth of Wookieepedia, Memory Alpha and all the other specialist wikis as their stuff has gone from Wikipedia. I think broadly speaking I'd come down on the side of preferring academic credibility to pop-culture accessibility if I was forced to make the choice. The deletionist/inclusionist debate has long been decided in favour of the former. What you're highlighting seems to me to be the inevitable end result, and may be a price we have to pay. I wonder how far it really affects milhist though? Clearly some editors might never have found their way to our project if they hadn't been drawn to WP by our pop-culture articles, but presumably most readers clicking on, say, Operation Cobra are more interested in a factual, informed and credible description of the offensive than a list of which video games it's loosely been featured in. If milhist had gone in a different direction years ago and our articles were now stuffed with pop-culture trivia and included fictional subjects like the Battle of Endor, I wonder where we'd be now? My hope is that, if participation does fall among one group of editors, it'll be offset by increased participation from others who have perhaps up to now been put off by Wikipedia's 'not a serious encyclopedia' image in some quarters. EyeSerene^talk 14:44, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

That's certainly true to some degree; but I think we need to be careful in distinguishing between exclusion of topics based on whether they fall into traditional "academic" disciplines and exclusion of topics because they are too "obscure" for a generalist encyclopedia. The former philosophy is one that generally regards our work kindly; military history is among the oldest and most traditional of historical disciplines. The latter philosophy, on the other hand, is by no means friendly to us; the only reason that "battlecruft" has not become a rallying cry is that "fancruft" is a more ubiquitously inviting target.

So, while I agree that the focus of military history articles should be serious, scholarly matters rather than pop-culture trivia, we should not be too eager to dismiss legitimate popular culture topics as being unworthy of inclusion. Many of them are arguably of far more general interest than many of the more obscure episodes of military history—to use EyeSerene's example, is the average reader more likely to know about or be interested in the Battle of Endor or the Battle of Serravalle (1544)?—and dismissing them as being "unimportant" to our readers will only add weight to similar arguments against our own topics of interest. Kirill ^{[talk] [prof]} 15:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I agree that importance is subjective, which is I suppose at least partly why the WP community saw the need to define notability in the way that it has. I hope my post didn't come across as suggesting that I regard some subjects as unimportant to Wikipedia in a global sense. If it did, I apologise for my lack of clarity. What I was getting at was that, taking a selfish view of milhist's scope alone, I think we can make a far stronger case for the Battle of Serravalle than the Battle of Endor - the case, of course, resting on notability grounds. As Intothatdarkness points out above our definition of notability does lend itself to these kinds of peculiarities. This is why I take the pragmatic view that despite their importance, some subjects - perhaps involving a systemic bias towards fictional and pop-culture ones - may in the end be better covered by specialist wikis that aren't constrained as we are by the GNG (though they have their own equally strict criteria, such as canon, in its place). As Tom suggests this may be a dangerous failing of our model, but we are where we are and I suppose only time will tell whether academic credibility must be bought at the price of catering for everyone and whether we'll be stronger or weaker for it. Maybe we'll find a happy medium.

Re "battlecruft", I don't really see an issue between generalism and specialism - I think Wikipedia has the space and scope to cater for both as long as notability is satisfied. Summary style, taken to its extreme, perhaps even encourages it. How the community decides to interpret the GNG at any one time seems to me to be the determining factor, and this does only ever seem to move in a direction that favours "academic" over "populist" subjects. Reading your and Tom's posts brought to mind Pastor Niemöller's "First they came…" :) Whether we as a project can do much to address a WP-wide issue when our articles fall largely into the academic camp I don't know. Maybe we're more of a contributory factor than a solution? EyeSerene^talk 17:36, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe that we have managed to find a "firm but fair" position for pop culture in our project in that our guidelines advocate for a responsible pop culture position. We permit a degree of latitude for cultural significance provided that the sources can be marshaled for a something akin to a short paragraph (call it three-five sourced sentences) so as to aviod the creation of pop culture lists in what are otherwise well written and polished articles. Where we are weak though is in the larger fiction camp, though this is an issue that is harder for us address head on. For example, to borrow from previous statements I've made, the UC Gundam timeline's One Year War is based in part on World War II. World War II falls within our scope as an article that concerns what may be the greatest war ever fought, yet we stake no claim to the One Year War article based on its loose basis in World War II. Now I grant that we are not here to help the fictional projects with their articles, but given that the article was based on WWII in part we could have claimed some ground to cover the material as being within our scope (incidentally, if you look at the article now, note that most of the meat of the article concerning the battles and such was removed to create the current version of the article). I would cite three other examples of our taking no initiative in fictional matters that could concern us: 1) most superheros created at the time were active in World War II fighting against Hitler and the Third Riech, yet we do not really voer them. The same could be said of the Watchmen, who were active as vigilantes during the cold war, and for certain films like Its a Wonderful Life where a war or conflict factors into the storyline somehow. We stake no claim to these works of fiction but based on our inclusion criteria we could if we wanted to. 2) Some toys, like GI Joe, had roles to play in the war or are widely associated with the armed services (as Joe is stateside), and yet again we pass on the opportunity to cover them within our project, though I grant that in this case the justification for including them would have to come from a more broadly construed understanding of those things we define as being within our scope. 3) In some cases fictional stories make use of real to life battles or real to life military equipment (in the case of the former, I cite justice league: savage time as an example, in the case of the latter, DDG-182 Mirai), and to make matters worse we cover these subjects schizophrenically (neither of the given examples are covered by us, but Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei is covered by us). I think we need either a better set of guidelines for what fiction (if any) we will cover, or perhaps invite the other projects to create a set of guidelines that somewhat reflect our firm but fair mentality. In the long run, it could be beneficial to all of Wikipedia, but that is at the moment just my opinion, and more importantly I am not even sure that we could get everyone in a fictional project effected by the proposed change to agree to implement any kind of change. Anyway, I hope this helps explain to some extent my two cents on this matter. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:14, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

What you've described is, to use a rough military correlation, a satellite area of our MilHist project. No one is likely to dispute that major wars, battles, famous military leaders, and a whole host of other stuff is our core focus. But, in addition to all that, we have numerous areas where the line becomes blurred as our core areas touch upon other areas. Fiction and fictionalization are a large area where this happens (in my mind the border between terrorism or covert operations and MilHist can be blurry as well). The project largely decides some loose rules governing which of these are and which are not, but those rules are completely self-imposed. We could, if we so desired, change them whenever we felt the need. Another example, not relating to fictional, is our stance on people. We don't cover everyone with some military service, unless that service was their claim to notability. Hence, sports stars who were enlisted for a few years aren't MilHist. Through these and related cases we do touch an excessively large number of projects tangentially, and could, if we wanted, play some role in working with them if we hadn't decided in large part to cut them off.Cromdog (talk) 18:28, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

What could make this project fail?

In a "worst case" scenario, what circumstances could make this project fail?

• As this project has a strong core of editors (measured in terms of numbers as well as knowledge, commitment and good faith/humour), it's pretty resilient. Historically the biggest threats to the project have been from disruptive POV-pushing editors, and this is likely to remain the case in the future. Wikipedia as a whole lacks good processes to deal with intelligent editors who behave unacceptably (as distinct from simple POV pushers or edit warriors) and an influx of such editors into this project would cause real problems. Historically, we've been lucky in that they've tended to have turned up one at a time, but several operating at the same time would really stress the project's resources for dealing with problematic editors and the articles they create. Nick-D (talk) 03:13, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Agreed with all of that. - Dank (push to talk) 12:01, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
    • I also agree. As we have a large core group of editors, it's hard to imagine all of them disappearing, even in a worst-case scenario. Having said that, an event that drives off a large proportion of the active editors in Milhist would essentially sound a death knell for us as one of, or the, strongest WikiProject(s) on the site. I would view this as a "fail". Having said all that, the possibility of anything like that happening in Milhist is very remote.
    • The easiest fail would simply be a lack of participation in the project's processes, which we've already been seeing (to an extent) in our review department. A few editors shoulder the burden at the moment, but if/when they leave or lower their participation, others will have to step up. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:28, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
• Borrowing from my previous comment, if the Apathy level increase and manages to gain critical mass then it could result in the project's total failure, though at the moment we are well away from anything that serious. More comically, if world peace were to become an abrupt reality we would end up with a definitive stopping point for military history and that would eventually cause the project to fail from a lack a new material to cover :) TomStar81 (Talk) 10:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
  • As a fairly new editor, I'd have to say that my experience in MilHist has been very positive. But the level of snarking and other behavior I've seen in Wiki in general is a real turn-off.Intothatdarkness (talk) 13:43, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• I've been mulling this over for a few days and still can't find a way of properly organising my thoughts, so apologies for the stream-of-conciousness tl;dr that's likely to follow.

  I agree with Nick et al that POV pushing has been the cause of the worst disruption I've encountered during my time at milhist. It's likely that in some ways we facilitate that ourselves by not coming down hard enough on potentially (or actively) disruptive editors when the warning signs start to appear, but I think doing so would entail a culture change that would ultimately harm the project. The milhist community seems to prefer to offer guidance rather than throwing its weight around, and those coords who also happen to be admins don't traditionally combine the two roles if it can be helped. This is right in my view. If coords (or anyone) became project policemen it would be utterly disastrous. The price of that is that sometimes we find disruption difficult to deal with where the disruptive editor is not susceptible to gentle correction through community pressure. This is not an insurmountable problem when it happens only rarely, but as Nick says we'd find ourselves in difficulties if a busload of seriously problematic editors all turned up at once. With no disrespect to venues like ANI, my experience has been that milhist matters are better dealt with in house because they so often require the input of subject experts. I think we would cope, but perhaps only by moving in an authoritarian direction that's at odds with our culture.

  I view a lack of participation in community processes (whether as Tom suggest through apathy or just through the departure of a core group of editors) as a more likely scenario, though our large membership base and sizeable coordination team (currently 15 plus two emeriti) mitigate the chances of this happening and have ensured continuity in project functions as regulars get called away from time to time. It's probably more of an issue with the A-Class review process than anything else as this relies so heavily on a few dedicated reviewers. Encouraging new reviewers is a perennial problem.

  Intothatdarkness mentions poor behaviour; this is particular concern of mine though whether it's worse Wikipedia-wide now than when I joined I can't really say. However I do believe that if we collectively allowed the project to degenerate into the kind of adversarial atmosphere one does see in places, it would be a catalyst in driving away good editors and perhaps precipitate the kind of collapse mentioned above, creating the conditions for POV pushing and disruption to take a foothold.

  Finally (to paraphrase Kirill who expresses this sentiment very well here), the project exists only as long as it has legitimacy and value in the eyes of its members, and that derives from a focus on supporting the development of good content with a minimum of interference. Without milhist good military history articles would still be written; our job is to make sure that the project adds value to this process rather than obstructing it. If the reverse was ever the case, then we'd truly fail and deservedly so. EyeSerene^talk 13:53, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

"Fail" points: rampant POV pushing, apathy, loss of focus, world peace

I'm glad that it seems that most of you regard the project as healthy. :)

Potential fail points identified:

• Loss of interest in maintaining the project and participating in its processes;
• A catastrophic rise in disruptive POV-pushing editors;
• Loss of focus or decorum (allowing collegial atmosphere to slip into the snarkiness found in some other parts of Wikipedia or losing sight of the mission of supporting the development of good content with a minimum of interference).

Nick-D points out that Wikipedia generally lacks good processes for dealing with intelligent editors who behave unacceptably (as distinct from more easily identifiable disruption from simple POV pushers or edit warriors), and EyeSerene notes that countering such individuals by becoming overly authoritative could endanger the project as well. In terms of participation, as with other threats, there seems to be no imminent danger, although it could be helpful to encourage increased participation in some processes, such as A level review.

I really like how you also considered solutions to these fail points. I hadn't considered asking for that. (Note to self.) I also didn't ask you guys to evaluate the health of your project, and I appreciate your consideration of that factor.

Overall, does this seem like a fair evaluation of critical fail points?--Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 20:32, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm come late to this (having had a bad cold all week), but some quick thoughts. Firstly, it is interesting that in the discussions so far, we collectively haven't really noted what "success" looks like. In terms of discussing success or failure, as a community we've taken for granted a shared understanding. Now, the goal of the project sits on our main ("...to build the foremost free-content encyclopedia of military history in the English language..."), but I suspect that most of us, whilst buying into that, tend to then put different weight on different elements beneath that. Some will perceive success as meaning the wikiproject continuing as a going concern; others will focus on numbers of editors and activity levels on the discussion page; others may put stress on the adherence to processes and guidelines; others will put a priority on maintaining a particular culture (e.g. friendly, welcoming); others still would gauge success by the number of articles, and in particular the number of highly graded articles being produced. My theory would be that successful wikiprojects, such as this one, are able to keep a substantial number of these success criteria aligned within a particular project umbrella.

A second thought is that in terms of comparing wikiprojects, you'd presumably want to use some common vocabulary. You could put a lot of our discussion so far on this page into three resource categories, namely people, equipment/kit and information/ideas, and then look at the economic, social and cultural processes that use and replenish those. (NB: generally, we take for granted that the IT support for wikipedia will solve the equipment/kit category for us, but it's worth noting as an essential enabler.) We'd probably find that the bits we're most successful at have really good processes for managing and growing key, "bottleneck" resources, and that the areas where we're at risk see our processes slightly unaligned with those bottlenecks. For example, we clearly need both access to specialist history books (information) and copy-editors (people) if we're going to produce high quality articles. I'd venture a guess that we have better or more aligned processes for dealing with the first than with the latter (e.g. our social processes mean that most of us, I'd suggest, tend to prefer talking about military history ideas from our favourite books than the nuances of copyediting), and we're therefore more at risk of the lack of copyeditors causing a problem for the success of the wikiproject than our access to scarce academic text drying up. Hchc2009 (talk) 08:01, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Where could this project improve?

In your opinion, what steps could the members of this WikiProject take to help reach its goals?

• The big issue is, of course, how welcoming the project is for new editors. While the standard of many military history articles has increased steadily over time, this also makes the learning curve for new editors much steeper and I fear that some give up. I *think* that the project pages and individual editors are welcoming, but I've been around for a long time so input from newer editors would be invaluable here. The project would also benefit from input from professional military historians, though I'm not sure how this could be arranged (this isn't just limited to this project, of course, as engaging professionals in a way that respects their expertise yet fits in with Wikipedia's amateur ethos is a long running challenge) - I'd like to see expert reviews of FA articles. Nick-D (talk) 03:41, 9 July 2011 (UTC)
  • Agreed with all of that. - Dank (push to talk) 12:04, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

• Interaction. I agree with Nick-D totally regarding the interaction with new editors. We need to provide as much assistance as we can, while at the same time reach out to the oldies and chip in wherever we can. I only joined this project a few weeks ago, but that is how I see the project the way it is. I requested some help at the WikiProject's talk page, but nobody seems to listen. I know full well that demanding immediate and comprehensive actions from fellow MilHist editors is not the way to go, but, I've got a really exciting plan regarding Soviet/Russian fighter aircraft. I've expanded two articles during the last week, and they are now ready for GAN nomination/GA statuses; two other aircraft are also at GANs and two at ACR. My point is, if each of us responds to every question and request, this Project will be much more efficient and enjoyable, because it's not a good feeling when you go to all the trouble trying to promote your plan and requesting help and having no response in words or actions. I will try to implement this, but with other commitments, mainly schooling, it will be a bit hard to carry out. Nevertheless, I will try.

  Another point is, if we see fellow editors do a lot of hard work, feel liberal to award them a barnstar. This is not only limited to this Project, but also throughout the Wikipedia-sphere. The reason why new editors are quitting en masse is because they do not receive proper recognition. We are all volunteers, so what's with the holding back off giving out barnstars? That's it from me. Sp33dyphil ^{"Ad astra"} 13:17, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Thank you Sp33dyphil for your interesting (and perhaps ironic in the light of what I posted above in #What does this project do well?) comments. I'd say the main reason you've had no response to your request is that most editors have their own projects or areas they're already busy with. Although we do have a large membership only a portion of those editors are active at any one time, and the chance of finding someone who is both currently unoccupied and interested in the Soviet aerospace industry is fairly small. In my experience people don't tend to respond with "Sorry, I can't help out" replies, they just don't post. That doesn't mean your message hasn't been read or that you shouldn't have bothered to ask - after all, you never know - but building collaborations takes time and often a bit of luck in finding someone with similar interests. Probably the best thing to do is just work on the articles and see who else shows up - Wikipedians are attracted by activity. You could also try asking at WikiProject Aircraft and WikiProject Russia if you haven't already.

Regarding your point about barnstars, milhist is traditionally rather stingy in that regard. Personally I don't think that's a bad thing; I believe project-level awards are worth more because they're used so sparingly, but any editor can always show their appreciation to others at any time with a personal award. It's also worth bearing in mind that many editors have strong objections to using barnstars and the sort of meaningless Facebook-type culture they believe it encourages. However, I think your general point about recognising the work of others is a real issue, whether we do it with barnstars or some other way. For me the biggest obstacle is identifying those editors who work quietly in the background on the less noticeable gnome-like tasks, other than when they happen to show up on my watchlist. I'd be interested to hear your further thoughts, EyeSerene^talk 16:39, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your response. What do you mean by many people have objections to using barnstars and that they encourage a Facebook-type culture? My whole point is that barnstars serve as a pat-in-the-back; if people do a lot of hard work, and the community does not recognise them, then they are robbed of valuable encouragement which, sometimes, is the thing that keeps them serving on the site. What I mean here by hard work is ranges from gnome-like tasks, as you say, to expansions and radical rewrites. We are all volunteers, so why not hand out awards, which means much more than their sole purpose. Again, thanks for your reply. Sp33dyphil ^{"Ad astra"} 02:43, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

There are some in the community who see giving barnstars, kittens, etc. akin to a non-serious Facebook-like social networking site. FWIW, I read your message on WT:MILHIST but didn't reply because I have my battleships... even though I'd love to see Su-37 get to FA after the primary antagonist in the first video game I owned, Ace Combat 4, used one. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:13, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Indeed :) I can understand why some editors think that way, though I also think we have to accept that (unlike some of us curmudgeonly old geezers) the new editors we're attracting now, and will be in the future, are of the so-called "Facebook generation". If we adopt a hostile or sneering attitude to the mechanisms of what younger editors see as normal social interaction we risk driving away the very people we'll be depending on to take Wikipedia into the future. We need the enthusiasm and energy of young editors just as much as we need the experience and maturity of older ones, so somehow we have to find ways of enabling the two to live side by side :)

That said, I don't want to lose focus on your point about recognising and encouraging editors. As a project we've discussed ways of identifying and attracting new members many times (without much in the way of concrete conclusions, it has to be said!). What I don't think we've really considered in much depth is how to retain members, which I guess is partly coming back to awards and recognition. Because you've been on Wikipedia for a while but are new to milhist, if you don't mind me asking: how did you find out about us and what made you decide to join? EyeSerene^talk 09:55, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

That all sounds right, although I'm one of the geezers and don't have a good handle on what students are looking for, and I need to learn. I'll talk with more UNC and Duke UNCG students and professors in military history before the semester starts ... I'd appreciate suggestions. I'm leaning toward just being my charming self and seeing where that goes, rather than tasking them with assignments from the WP:Ambassador materials. - Dank (push to talk) 11:24, 12 July 2011 (UTC) "UNCG" 16:39, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Sp33dyphil, your comments about your attempt to establish a collaboration getting a disappointing response do raise a good point - I've had similar experiences. While this project does boast some excellent collaborations (WP:OMT in particular) it can be difficult to find other people who want to work along side you on individual articles. To a large degree this is unavoidable given that this is a volunteer website and people have their own interests which aren't always compatible - for instance, when I saw your post I wanted to help out as a thank you for your good work on the F-111C article, but I don't know the first thing about Soviet and Russian aircraft. An approach which can work is to ask for assistance on particular bits of the article (eg, someone with an interest in Russian military strategy might be able to help out with the background to the development of the aircraft). I also agree with your comments about recognition of good work. Nick-D (talk) 10:35, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• Our editing environment is slightly tilted toward the vets, so being a little more understanding and patient with the noobs would be nice. We could also crack open the award vault a little more often; as I have noted before, our project's members are notoriously stingy about handing out our in house award - or any other award for that matter - to editors who help us out. An anthropological study of our project as it relates to wikipedia and the offline world could help us better determine where we need improvement, though I am not sure how realistic the odds are of getting anthropologist(s) to do that would be. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
  • I concur with much of that. We have a vast wealth of experience to tap into in the form of dozens of what Intothatdarkness referred to above as "senior editors". If we could share that with newbies and get them more involved in the project (WP in general and MilHist specifically), we put our collective time to good use and we encourage the newbies to stay and hopefully offer their own expertise once they've learnt the ropes. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 15:49, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
    • That was, if I recall correctly, one of the reasons for starting the project academy; we would be able to compile our collective experience into a form that would be easily accessible to newer editors. Unfortunately, the academy has been in a half-finished state for some time now; while there are always plans to complete it, they always seem to get pushed back by more pressing issues. Perhaps it's something we should focus on in the coming year. Kirill ^{[talk] [prof]} 17:05, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

Building better practices

You guys have a lot of good thoughts on this one.

A major focus is on new member recruitment: how to reach out to new contributors to help draw them in, integrate them, make them feel valued and retain them once they've arrived. Nick-D notes that there may be challenges for new users as the learning curve increases with project standards. TomStar81 suggests more understand and patience, and HJ Mitchell suggests that senior editors should share their knowledge/experience with newcomers (allowing themselves to profit in turn by what the newcomers know). Kirill poses the idea that it may be good to focus on finishing the Academy.

Newer member Sp33dyphil talks about his experiences as a new contributor and suggests greater responsiveness to requests for collaboration (alas, sometimes challenging on a volunteer-driven project where people have diverse interests/knowledge).

The question of how work should be acknowledged is broached; most people agree that recognition is important for all kinds of contribution, although the issue of how (barnstar or not), how much and by whom (project or individual) is still open. The ed17 and EyeSerene spotlight the conflict between those who like barnstars (etc.) and those who find them frivolous, noting that a balance has to obtained to keep both sides happy. Recognizing that the "Facebook generation" may be drawn to such rewards, User:Dank intends to broach the subject of recognition with students and professors.

Other specific ideas bounced include finding a professional military historian to review featured content, while an anthropological study of the project itself could help determine how it could improve.

Any more practices? Thoughts on those already proposed? (Did I miss anything or get anything wrong?) --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 21:05, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

How can this project expand?

How can this project reach out to and nurture newcomers to Wikipedia who share an interest in the project's goals?

Do you mean new editors who show an interest in articles within the project's scope, or reaching out to people with an interest in military history and getting them to contribute to WP? Or both? HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:15, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Actually, I was thinking about new editors who show an interest in articles within the project's scope, but I like the other idea as well. Certainly, it would help improve the contributor pool! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 20:16, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, on the first, I think the two questions a newbie is going to ask are: "wtf is a 'wikiproject'?" and "how is it relevant to me. I don't have an easy answer, but maybe a list of open tasks broken down into subject areas might be a place to get them started. For example, the 32,000 MilHist articles that need referencing work is overwhelming even to a seasoned editor and really doesn't appeal to me. However, if there were a list of post-WWII British Army generals whose articles need referencing work, I'd probably work on it between major projects. That's quite a narrow area of expertise (and one I often seem to have largely to myself), but many of our best content writers started out not knowing where to work, but then became prolific producers of audited content once they found their niche. Perhaps if we can narrow down the categories of articles needing attention—maybe not as narrow as post-WWII British Army generals, but narrower than the current task forces—we might be able to help people find their niche. But how we find these people and point them in the direction of a list of crappy articles they'd enjoy expanding, I'm not sure. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 20:32, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

I'd say don't expand in the literal sense, but consolidate the Project's reach. WP Military history is already large, covering tens of thousands of articles. We don't want another Roman Empire where it expanded to the point resources are stretched, and eventually fails. Instead, I prefer if the Project consolidate, for example, by working on subjects that had received huge coverage, but have yet to reach at least GA status, such as the Vietnam War. It also seems like some of the four special projects are going nowhere. My doctrine first is to consolidate and build a strong foundation before moving on. Sp33dyphil ^{"Ad astra"} 05:40, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

We've discussed attempting to collaborate with universities or various militaries on the strategy talk page before (similar to the Global University Program and GLAM), although nothing has come of it as of yet. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 05:57, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

• We could strength ties with wikipedia projects that actually have articles that fall within our scope and their scope. A good many of the region task forces are run somewhat jointly by us and the geographical wikiproject in question (for example, the Mai Lay Massacre is covered by us and by the Vietnamese project, in our case though the East Asia task force) yet most articles like this end up edited principle by our project members alone. It would help us immensely if the geographical projects would encourage there people to edit our articles as well; while I admit that every project governs things a little differently, the basics are always the same - NPOV, AGF, add RS, etc, etc, and really anyone in any project can do that. This alone would energize something like 35% of our total task force structure, and allow us to continue growing and expanding without necessarily having to actively fish for people to come and join the project. One way to help people realize that projects cross edit would be to share major newsletter highlights - for example, having the Vietnam project share a major story with milhist would help reinforce the idea that we share a common task force, and could help editors from both project cross edit for the other project without feeling wierd about it. Another way we could expand is work on getting university level institutions and military museums and such to help with our articles. Wikipedia still commands a front page answer in a google search, and museums and universities could benefit from supporting big projects that get off wikipedia media attention. As before, I think some level of anthropological investigation could help us turn what have so far been low level talks into a feasible plan of action should we choose to look into anthropology. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:41, 12 July 2011 (UTC)
  • What you say makes sense Tom, but it breaks down when we get to the other projects. Like us, they have no power over what their contributors edit; this also assumes that there are actually active editors in those projects. The other ideas (from "one way to help people" and below) are excellent. You might be interested in WP:GLAM. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 20:03, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Growing

Since much of your practices above focus on new editors, it may not have been necessary for me to ask this question, but I see you guys have managed to put out some good thoughts on it anyway. :)

Ideas for growth seem largely based on making it easier for interested contributors to find articles to work on or the project itself, in the idea of subdividing maintenance categories to more narrow subject areas and the notion of reaching out to universities and militaries. Perhaps museums, too, would be interested in contributing, given the high visibility of Wikipedia articles. Collaboration with other wikiprojects that have intersecting articles might also spark mutual development (although there are always problems with a voluntary workforce); a specific suggestion includes cross-communication in newsletters with other projects.

Sp33dyphil suggests pulling in on some task forces that may not be necessary and consolidating efforts on building a stronger base, working on articles that need to be improved.

Anything else? Anything wrong? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 21:19, 15 July 2011 (UTC)

Interesting thoughts on the task force issue (I missed them above, sorry), as we reigned them in a little bit ago by redirecting all the talk pages to WT:MILHIST. We found that individually they were almost completely inactive, and because of that 'real' posts there tended to be lost among month's worth of review notices (example). They now function more for categorical reasons, albeit categories with member, content, and resource lists (example). I fully agree with Sp33dyphil's want to pull them in, but we've already done that. ;-)

The special projects are a bit different (WP:MILHIST#STRUCT). We haven't really looked at why yet, but three of the four special projects are mostly dead (WP:OMT being the exception). The Normandy project saw a lot of activity at the beginning, but Clime.ca/Cam shifted to Japanese battleships, Buggie went to Austro-Hungarian and Russian battleships, and Enigma has been busy. "Brothers at War" and "Great War Centennial" have been dead for awhile. GWC can be explained by not enough writers for very high-scope articles, but I'm not sure about BaW.

For the successful project disclaimer, I'm a member, Majestic Titan ("OMT") was discussed somewhat often at the Wikipedia in Higher Education Summit (talk about a surprise for me when OMT got randomly mentioned in Sadad's presentation) and was held up as a quintessential collaboration/project by more than one person. However, when three out of four similar measures have fizzled, what has separated OMT from the others? Preliminarily, I'd put the major factor on number of editors involved and/or amount of content being produced by the number of editors you have; Parsecboy has single-handedly gotten every German battleship/battlecruiser to GA or higher, while Sturmvogel 66 has written a lot in most categories there. To bolster this, the Normandy project could easily get back on track if Enigma gets less busy and Cam moves back into the topic (which he is doing, actually). I'd love to hear other opinions on this though. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 08:32, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

One advantage WP:OMT has is that a relatively small number of excellent reference books on battleships was able to form the basis for most of the articles. As a result, it was possible for editors to share references across many different articles without quality being compromised - many of the discussions at WT:OMT have been asking one another to check references and add material. The project has also benefited from a competition between editors to develop new articles, and the topics these article cover are fairly straightforward to write about (disclaimer: I've also taken part in this project). Nick-D (talk) 08:43, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Special projects are an interesting subject when one considers the discussion above about "what could make milhist fail". I'm a member of Op Normandy and this was largely driven by a few very good content writers. My role was mostly mapmaking, copyediting and chipping in content where I could, and other editors contributed in a similar way. When Enigma, Cam and the other prolific content creators moved on to other things there wasn't much left for the supporting editors like me to do. The reasons they moved on are various - RL studies, house moves, new jobs etc - though we did have to deal with a horribly disruptive editor for quite a few months who I believe may have contributed to the lack of activity of some participants. For me this is a microcosm of the entire project and illustrates the effect that the loss of a group of core editors, combined with the arrival of severely disruptive ones, might have.

On a more hopeful note, Op Normandy is far from dead, it's just suffered a hiatus :) I have an article that's being prepared for greatness in fits and starts (it hasn't helped that my sources are all still boxed up for a house move that never happened!), Enigma has indicated he should be able to increase his activity soon, and some others seem picking up from where we've left off as well. EyeSerene^talk 16:06, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Any of you willing to speak one-on-one to staff?

Resolved

 – Thank you all! You should all be in contact with staff at this point, and they have what they need at the moment. Your helpfulness is appreciated. :D --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 18:12, 9 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi, guys. :)

While I was in San Francisco last week, I pointed a number of staff people to the work you have been doing here. They're very interested, and in fact a couple of the Fellows from the "Summer of Research" are very much hoping that some (or all!) of those participating here would be willing to talk one on one with them, via e-mail or IRC. They are working on a tool designed to help WikiProjects, and your insight and experience would be highly appreciated in shaping their work. If you're willing to help out, please just let me know, either via e-mail (mdenniswikimedia.org) or by dropping your name here (I'll follow up with you, in that case).

In terms of the above, I hope to update my nutshells in the next couple of days (catching up after the trip has been hectic). --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 13:19, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

My dear Maggie, if anyone wants to subject themselves to me holding forth on the subject of MilHist, I'm only too willing to accommodate them... ;-) Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 13:39, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I've been a bit too busy with school this last semester to respond above, but that now that it's over I can spend more time on Wiki and I'd be happy to discuss stuff with a staff member if they'd like.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 13:57, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

To echo Ian, I'm happy to share my thoughts (at length, even!) with anyone willing to put up with reading them. :-) Kirill ^{[talk] [prof]} 14:51, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Like my distinguished colleagues I'd be happy to help out :) If you follow up via email, can I request that you also ping my talk page? I don't check my mail as often as I probably should... EyeSerene^talk 14:53, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

• Thank you! All of you who have responded so far should have e-mails from me. :) More are very welcome! --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 16:18, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm more than happy to help. HJ Mitchell | Penny for your thoughts? 16:21, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

• I'm in. Just tell me where to sign up and I'd be happy to lend my two cents to anyone looking for it. I have no idea how IRC works, but I have a good grasp on email and would be more than happy to communicate on that medium :) TomStar81 (Talk) 00:18, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm also interested in this. I live on the other side of the world to San Francisco, so email would work best. Nick-D (talk) 02:11, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Me eight, I'm always willing to help where I can. :-) Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 04:22, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

I am willing to help. Hawkeye7 (talk) 05:42, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Conclusions

First, I have to say how much I do appreciate your thorough responses here. The page itself will stand to communicate the full details of the conversation, but the following is an overview of major points I see, in a nutshell. Please let me know if you see any issues with this. :) (I'll collapse it in due course.)

Nutshell: Asked to weigh in on five questions related to the health of the project, its challenges and its growth points, the project arrives at the following:

• It benefits from dedicated, competent & mature contributors.
• It benefits from a collegial environment that encourages others through praise and constructive criticism.

• Loss of that environment is a potential fail point

• It needs to maintain motivation amongst new & old members.

• Failure to keep up processes (article reviews, etc.) is a potential fail point for the project

• Editors must keep up with Wikipedia’s increasingly complex practices.
• Articles in the subject area have uneven coverage and are sometimes biased due to contributor demographics
• Tension between pop culture/serious article subjects may devalue their work
• Lack of good practices for dealing with marginally (as opposed to obviously) disruptive editors constitutes a potential risk
• Project could improve on new member outreach (including reaching beyond Wikipedia) & mentorship

• Could make it easier to identify articles of interest

• Project needs to balance an approach that works with “Facebook” culture as well as what is historically embraced on Wikipedia
• Project could benefit from professional to evaluate featured content

Summary:

Question 1: What does this project do well?

Project excels at collaboration, working together and providing feedback, even to newcomers. The Project fosters a low-drama environment due to the maturity of its participants and their ability to put aside ego to accomplish goals. The project excels at motivation, providing recognition for personal achievement and also assessing articles. They feel that these increase desire of others to contribute and also encourage article improvement. Overall, the members of the project are hard-working.

Other elements mentioned include interacting well with other projects, being innovative, and maintaining a manageable size.

Question 2: What challenges face your project?

Primary challenge is apathy: the need to keep old members engaged and new members coming. They believe that maintaining motivational practices such as article review processes are key. They face the Wikipedia-wide challenges of keeping up with change and increasingly complex policies/guidelines. They recognize the problems of systemic bias—both in blind spots in article coverage and in biased writing. They also perceive a bias in Wikipedia itself towards pop culture which devalues more serious encyclopedic work, although some suggest that pop culture topics are themselves increasingly devalued—and driving contributors away.

Question 3: What could make this project fail?

If contributors stop maintaining the project’s processes for motivation, the project will fail. A catastrophic rise in disruptive POV-pushing editors could create more maintenance than members can mage, particular as Wikipedia lacks good procedures for dealing with contributors who behave badly but are not immediately identifiable as vandals.

Question 4: Where could this project improve?

The project could use a major focus on new member recruitment and retention, especially as learning curves increase. Better mentorship is a good goal. Refining protocols for project-wide recognition would be a good idea, taking into account the conflict between the “Facebook generation” and the grumpy old guy network.

The project could do with a professional military historian to advise on featured content.

Question 5: How can this project expand?

Make it easier for interested contributors to find articles to work on or the project itself by reaching out to outside agencies (universities, militaries, museums) and subdividing maintenance categories to more narrow subject areas.

Based on your feedback above, I believe I need to ask future groups who are willing to self-assess to also assess the current health of their projects. If you see any other ways that I could improve the question process, please let me know. :)

And thank you all again. --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 17 August 2011 (UTC)