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DYK material

We hand out awards for those who assess the most in the project monthly, I wonder if we may also extend an award to the person who contributes the most milhist related DYK material to the mainpage and to the person who has the highest DYK hook for the month. Thoughts?

Sounds like an OK idea, except that we'd have to come up with a structure for monitoring DYKs and recording who has how many. – Joe N 21:39, 22 July 2009 (UTC)
Not a bad idea, Tom, but I think the main problem with this is that it would be extremely difficult—not to mention time consuming—to track. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 01:53, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
Not a coordinator, but I do stalk a number of coords, so I thought I'd add my 2 cents. This doesn't sound like something that would be too hard to set up; it could function exactly the same as WP:MILCON. Those editors who want to participate could just add their articles, with the necessary links to the DYK archive, to a subpage. If you wanted to track the highest number of hits per month, that's already being done at WP:DYKSTATS; you'd just have to look at the end of the month once everything is tallied. Parsecboy (talk) 12:20, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
Another option might be to use the list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Open tasks to track the DYK appearances. I suspect it may be incomplete—it probably doesn't handle articles that are tagged for the project after their appearance—but it's probably usable as a starting point. Kirill [talk] [pf] 12:29, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
A worthwhile idea, if the administrative overhead is sufficiently low ;) Kirill, that list doesn't mention DYK at the moment, so I'm assuming what you're saying is that appropriate articles could be added by bot? EyeSerenetalk 14:31, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
It does track them already, scroll down to article alerts and then the did you know section. As Kirill says though, only tracks already tagged articles. Regards, Woody (talk) 14:40, 23 July 2009 (UTC)
Just took another look and finally spotted it :P Thanks Woody EyeSerenetalk 20:43, 23 July 2009 (UTC)

Assuming someone checks the open tasks, this is doable. The problem would be if we had to go combing through WP:RA for milhist articles; I really doubt anyone would want to do that much reading... :| —Ed (Talk • Say no to drama) 03:31, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

Tom brought this up today on my talk page for possible inclusion in The Bugle. I was going to chip in earlier but decided to see how it ran first. I'm afraid I'm not sure I'm very keen on this idea and have a number of reservations:
  • First, from a practical point of view, I see that 60-80 DYKs per month fall within our scope: that's a lot of articles to identify the authors of and keep running tallies.
  • Second, for what numbers are barnstars contemplated? The "official" DYK awards are dished out at milestone of 25, 50, 100 and 200. Given how easy they are to do that seems sensible. Tracking on these volumes would be a nightmare for us.
  • Third, is there actually a problem that this is solving? Despite the lack of a Milhist DYK award, DYK is clearly well-represented with Milhist articles, on average two or three a day.
  • Four, it might be better if coordinators were generally more inspirational role, focused on bigger issues. The task forces could use some input; the Academy needs a mountain of tidying up; A-Class may need its profile sharpening up. So, in short, I'm not sure this is good use of time.
As ever, all input very welcome.  Roger Davies talk 17:47, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Stealth Blimp

If a few extra coordinators could keep an eye on this page for the next week or so I would be grateful; we appear to be dangerously close to a wheel war of sorts of the forum page that keeps reappearing and disappearing. At the moment, I think the editor adding the link may be open to discussion, but in a worse case scenario we may need to protect the page or block the account. Thanks in advance. TomStar81 (Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 18:47, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Watchlisted. That's a very strange article. Nick-D (talk) 08:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Same here EyeSerenetalk 18:50, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
I am seriously entertaining the idea of an afd for the article because it appears to be cruft and crystal largely, and there seems to be no development related material for the project.
That might not be a bad idea. For me the alarm-bells start ringing on any article whose opening line is "X is believed to be..." EyeSerenetalk 19:37, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Yeah. My BS detector is ringing quite loudly at the moment. Cam (Chat) 21:55, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

(od) AFD'd it, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Stealth Blimp to comment. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:56, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

I see that this has just been closed as a delete - great work Tom. Nick-D (talk) 01:06, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

ACR period

The latest one by Nick-D has been closed in two days by Eurocopter. While it's good that ACRs are kept open for long if no reviewers come in order to not put pressure on people to do quick reviews in four days, I do think that ACRs should be kept open for some minimum time in case some unscrupulous may decide to organise a few mates to pile on and support and get their article passed by ambush without others having a reasonable time to check it (this hasn't happened here, of course) YellowMonkey (cricket photo poll!) paid editing=POV 00:58, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

I was under the impression the ACRs were to be open for a minimum 4 days. I guess that shows where I have been lately :/ I do agree though, some minimum time would be a good idea. TomStar81 (Talk • Some say ¥€$, I say NO) 01:01, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Well, yes, 2 days seems a bit quick in case people actually have objections. I've also seen them closed after only 2 supports (and no opposes) when there was a large backlog that a proactive coord wanted to clear. I'd say a minimum review period of 4 (or preferably 5) days should be codified - we want to maintain our standards, not just get the numbers up. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 01:17, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
I agree. A minimum, as Ian says, of 4–5 days should be in place; I actually wanted to comment on Nick's article. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 01:59, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
Even though I was a beneficiary of the current arrangements, I also agree with a minimum period - 5 days as suggested by Ian seems reasonable (though it is rare for most ACRs to attract three votes in much less than a week). Further comments on the Convoy GP55 article would be fantastic! Nick-D (talk) 08:54, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
I was amazed at how quickly the Convoy article was closed: I had reviewed another article and was planning on doing the Convoy one, and then I went there and it was closed. I'd say that 5-7 days is OK. While this problem obviously comes up very rarely, especially with the number of reviewers we currently have, it wouldn't hurt to set a standard length of time for them to be open. – Joe N 17:23, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Up until May 2008, they used to be open for a fixed four days but too many were being failed because they had been insufficiently reviewed rather than were inherently poor so we changed it. Perhaps the way forward is for ACRs to stay open a minimum of four days and a maximum of twenty-eight. Does that sound reasonable?  Roger Davies talk 17:31, 29 July 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. That should make sure that everyone has time to comment on all of them while keeping some from dragging on indefinitely. Of course, exceptions could be made for a few days while objections were being worked out. – Joe N 17:53, 29 July 2009 (UTC)
28 days maximum sounds fair, though I think the tendency in the comments above is a bit more towards 5 days (call it a working week) minimum rather than 4... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 02:14, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

I've just updated the A-Class review instructions accordingly.  Roger Davies talk 00:33, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Notification of absence

Hi guys, I'd like to announce you that i'm leaving for holiday this evening and most likely I will not be able to contribute at all for about ten days. Someone might want to take care of the A-class reviews while I'll be away. Thanks and all the best, --Eurocopter (talk) 09:57, 31 July 2009 (UTC)

OK, have a great holiday Nick-D (talk) 10:13, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
When you're gone is when most of us get the opportunity to close ACRs since you do most of them. ;) Have a good vacation. -MBK004 19:50, 31 July 2009 (UTC)
Have fun! – Joe N 00:59, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm in the same boat as Eurocopter. I leave on the 2nd and I'll be back on the 8th. Cam (Chat) 05:05, 1 August 2009 (UTC)
Enjoy, both of you ;) I'll be off for a couple of weeks too in the near future, though I'll still be around intermittently. EyeSerenetalk 09:38, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

I, too, will add my name to the list of coordinators shirking their responsibilities ;) I'm off until mid-August for a well-deserved (if I do say so myself) vacation. — Bellhalla (talk) 14:26, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Bon voyage, amigo! Have fun, and we will see you on your return. TomStar81 (Talk) 17:46, 3 August 2009 (UTC)

Me too. I'm heading off tomorrow morning for a couple or three weeks. I've got Broadband when I get there so I'll only be off air for a day or two on the way down, and the way back.  Roger Davies talk 21:24, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Enjoy your vacation! TomStar81 (Talk) 21:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
Thanks!  Roger Davies talk 21:38, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

Logistics department alert box?

Would it be possible to create an alert box similar to the article alert box we already have for logistic department requests? Or perhaps add the logistics department requests to the alert alert box? Having the information available in a review box that our users can add to their user space may improve the efficiency at which our members can gain assistance. I know that is how I can tell when new A-class reviews come up, and if we were to create such a box then we could invite non-members of our project who may be good at image restoration and copyediting and such to add the box to their userspace to broaden our logistical capabilities somewhat. Thoughts? TomStar81 (Talk) 05:21, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that the review alert box is simply a differently-formatted copy of the review list in the announcement box; for logistics, on the other hand, we don't have a an updated list of requests, and I'm not convinced that the marginal benefit of an extra box is worth the effort of maintaining one, or that anyone will be willing to do so in any case. Kirill [talk] [pf] 14:01, 4 August 2009 (UTC)
Oh well. Guess we will just have to make people keep the page watchlisted :) Thanks for the reply at any rate, I appreciate it. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:28, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Important update for those closing A-class reviews

Our toolbox is currently short two features: the edit counter and disambig checker. While the edit counter is a give or take for me, the disambig counter is important and sadly will not be back up again until 10 August at the earliest. Therefore, if at all possible, try and withold closing ACRs that have not had a disambig check until then so we can catch and correct the problem here before passing the articles up to the FAC people. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:53, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

Looks like these are working again now... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 00:56, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

External Peer Review

I just stumbled upon a regular peer review for Operation Crossroads: Wikipedia:Peer review/Operation Crossroads/archive1, since I'm about to go out the door, would someone mind taking care of setting up our redirects to get some more reviewers to this via our alert system? -MBK004 18:53, 5 August 2009 (UTC)

Done, and added to /Announcements.  Roger Davies talk 05:59, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

Has the FAC strike rate improved?

A few months ago some of the regular FAC reviewers were complaining that many of the military history FACs were deficient against the criteria (particularly the technical criteria) and that our peer and A-class reviews weren't catching obvious problems. While I don't keep a close eye on FACs, it would seem that most of the recent nominations have gone through without problems. Is this correct? If so, the project has probably earned itself a big pat on the back. Nick-D (talk) 05:29, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I asked SandyGeorgia, so we should have our answer soon. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:22, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
I can't recall having noticed issues lately (as I was for a while), so things do seem to have improved ! SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:07, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
That's good to know, Sandy. Thanks :)  Roger Davies talk 21:21, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
The most common problems I had been noticing were RS and MOS-related. I have been trying to catch our articles at FAC, if not before, for a MOS review. They do seem to be improving. Maralia (talk) 03:14, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

If anyone has the inclination for number crunching, the raw data is available in: Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Featured log and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Archived nominations. This gives us the following overall statistics:

Month Promoted Archived Total % promoted
January–July 309 294 603 51%
July 2009 35 34 69 51%
June 2009 52 41 93 56%
May 2009 44 38 82 54%
April 2009 39 47 86 45%
March 2009 50 39 89 56%
February 2009 41 37 78 53%
January 2009 48 58 106 45%

I haven't (obviously) worked these out as percentages, but this does give us monthly promoted/archived ratios. Milhist candidates could be compared with the overall figures to see if they vary. Now that would be interesting (hint, MBK004, hint).  Roger Davies talk 07:15, 15 August 2009 (UTC)

I've just added the percents. I'm pretty sure that military history FACs have a better than average likelihood of passing. Nick-D (talk) 23:59, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
If you want me to go through all for the year so far, I will as hinted at by Roger, unless you've already started. -MBK004 01:07, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
I haven't started looking at the military history ones Nick-D (talk) 03:48, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

MILHIST-specifc:

Month Promoted Archived Total % promoted
August 2009 (to date) 5 2 7 71%
January–July 68 29 97 70%
July 2009 8 3 11 73%
June 2009 8 2 10 80%
May 2009 9 4 13 69%
April 2009 10 7 17 59%
March 2009 12 5 17 71%
February 2009 8 5 13 62%
January 2009 13 3 16 81%

Some interesting statistics I have encountered while compiling this data:

  • Of the 68 articles promoted from January to July, 57 (84%) successfully passed our A-Class Review before going on to FAC, while one failed its ACR but passed at FAC via GA, with ten articles not undergoing an ACR before FAC (some did not even go through the Good Article process, the most glaring example being USS Connecticut (BB-18) written by our own The_ed17 (talk · contribs)).
  • Of the 29 articles that were not promoted from January to July, only 12 (41%) underwent an ACR and two of those articles failed the ACR.
  • Of the 29 articles that were not promoted from January to July, 7 subsequently were promoted to FA upon another attempt at FAC.
  • Of the 29 articles that were not promoted from January to July, 5 were withdrawn by their nominator instead of a complete review and failure.
  • From January to July, 16% of all FACs were of articles that fell under the scope of this project.

This is quite interesting and really shows the value of taking your articles to ACR before FAC. If anyone is interested in the actual data instead of this synopsis, I will gladly place it in a user sub-page upon request. -MBK004 05:42, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

  • I have a different use in mind for the data: If know one objects, I would like to add these statistics to one of our Academy pages discussing the A-class review process to encourage people to make use of the ACR system. We have the data to back up the claim that our ACR process improves the odds of getting through FAC, and I believe that would be of interest to those first time contributors ginning for a bronze-starred article. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:46, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
That's excellent work and analysis MBK. I've personally found the peer review and ACR process to be hugely beneficial to articles which go on the FACs. Nick-D (talk) 08:04, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
Thank you. For completeness, I'm going to go through the FAR archives, although we have a dismal record there (I don't recall many articles being kept). -MBK004 08:20, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
It would probably be worth including the comparative statistics in the next newsletter, possibly in graph form. Being ahead of the curve is always good for project morale. Kirill [talk] [pf] 21:53, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
Indeed, it would :) I'll do so for the next issue. It's not really surprising the hit rate is so good though given that ACR was specifically retasked to be a dry run for FAC. I'm just wondering whether beefing up the criteria a bit for B-class would increase the number of articles going for ACR. One thing that bothers me about B-class is that it doesn't say much about cites/refs though these become increasingly important the higher up the ratings the article goes.  Roger Davies talk 15:30, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
Granted, Rog - to clarify, are you talking about the number/granularity of citations or the reliability of the sources used? I ask about the latter because I've seen sources used in B-Class articles that I don't think would necessarily stand up at the more rigorous standards of ACR or FAC. In any case, the risk I see with beefing up B-Class to bring it closer to A-Class (if that is the goal here) is that it further increases the perceived gap between Start and B-Class, which opens us up for yet another push for adoption of the old chestnut C-Class... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 16:21, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
I recall controversy a while back about how our B-Class standards were higher than the normal ones followed. I don't remember what became of that, but if that's still the case we should be very careful about raising ours even higher and creating a larger gap between us and the rest of the community. – Joe N 19:43, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
From memory, that was a bit of a storm in a teacup, but I do think that the current B class criteria is about right. In my view, a B class article is a 'pass'; it covers its topic adequately, gives readers some leads for further reading and looks reasonably attractive. I'm comfortable with lower quality sources in B class articles than As - as long as they're there and appear reliable (even if they are, for example, a website related to the article's topic or an OK-looking self-published source which wouldn't be suitable for A class articles) they do the job. It seems to me to be overkill to too critically assess sources as part of B class assessments. Nick-D (talk) 11:58, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

FAR stats

Month Kept Removed Total % kept
January–July 32 94 126 25%
July 2009 1 15 16 6%
June 2009 2 18 20 10%
May 2009 6 14 20 30%
April 2009 6 21 27 22%
March 2009 6 13 19 32%
February 2009 6 6 12 50%
January 2009 5 7 12 42%

MILHIST-specific:

Month Kept Removed Total % kept
August 2009 (to date) 2 2 4 50%
January–July 4 12 16 25%
July 2009 0 2 2 0%
June 2009 0 2 2 0%
May 2009 1 1 2 50%
April 2009 3 2 5 60%
March 2009 0 3 3 0%
February 2009 0 1 1 0%
January 2009 0 1 1 0%
I don't think it's particularly surprising, actually; we make no special effort at the project level to save articles at FAR, so I would expect the performance there to tend towards the overall average. Kirill [talk] [pf] 21:39, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
The reason I said it was surprising was because I recognize that we make no special effort. I expected the ratio to be less than the overall average. -MBK004 21:45, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
Well, I don't think anyone else makes a special effort either. ;-) Kirill [talk] [pf] 21:50, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
I suggest you read the talk page at FAR particularly about how the ratio of saves to keeps has diminished somewhat since March.(particularly see this section) If and when that percentage increases again as expected then I think our figures will be a bit lower than the average. Woody (talk) 23:27, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Interesting FAC experiment in the works

Just noticed this and it will be extremely interesting to watch. An article that is under our scope: History of the United Kingdom during World War I (currently GA and failed an ACR in July 2009) is planned to be nominated at FAC and reviewed en-mass on an episode of WikiVoices, see this: Wikipedia:Wikivoices#Our_next_Skypecast. It would be nice to have at least one MILHIST reviewer in the mix. -MBK004 20:50, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Have a meeting for work at the same time the Skypecast is, but if it gets over quick I will certainly participate. —Ed (Talk • Contribs) 03:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Black Projects and MILMOS

As long as I am trying to organize a working group for the black project articles I may as well make this observation too: Our MILMOS has no explicit sections on or relating to Black Projects. Now I grant that these articles are expected to conform to all policies and guidelines, but being as how we had to spell out the she/it debate in our MOS so that both sides could find some peace and stability in ship articles I am wondering if maybe spelling out similar specifics in our MOS would help tighten the quality of our black project articles.

Since our MOS requires active discussion to establish consensus to add or subtract content I thought I would start here and see if the coordinators were in agreement that this would be a good idea, and if so what our MoS should cover in a proposed black project section. Bare in mind that any agreement we have on this matter would have to go before the rest of the project on the main talk page before any updates to our MoS occur. TomStar81 (Talk) 22:42, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

I suppose the first question is what sort of guidelines you think would need to be added? A subsection covering the recommended structure of a "black project" article should be reasonable enough, but I would be wary of making other aspects of the style guide (e.g. sourcing, style, etc.) specific to a particular topic area, particularly one so narrow.
So what do you have in mind? Kirill [talk] [pf] 23:21, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
At the very least, explicitly stating that no exceptions will be made for coverage or accuracy in black project related articles. Something like:
Black Project articles
Articles that report on Black Projects within the scope of the Military history Project are required to conform to Wikipedia's policies governing Verifiability and What Wikipedia is Not. In particular, these article must be free Original Research and Fringe Theories. Whenever possible, the information presented in an article on a Black Project should be sited to reliable sources, otherwise the information should be omitted from the article altogether. Attempts to justify the inclusion of material in a black project article on grounds that the subject matters warrants leniency due to inadequate reference material or other IAR-related claims will not be accepted as a viable reason to relax the existing policies and guidelines.

Obviously, this is merely a brainstorm, but I think that this could help improve the quality of our black project articles. I am open to suggestions for how this can be improved. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:07, 17 August 2009 (UTC)

I wouldn't mention WP:NOT; I think the point is stronger if the guideline is kept focused on core WP:V/WP:OR issues. Beyond that, I think something along these lines would be a valuable addition to the sourcing section of the guide, although I'd suggest broadening it a bit to include anything where sources are (presumably) classified. For example:

Articles that report on "black projects" and other classified topics are required to fully conform to Wikipedia's policies governing verifiability, original research, and fringe theories. All information presented in such articles must be appropriately cited to reliable sources [as outlined above]. The inadequacy of public sources may not be used to justify the inclusion of unsourced or poorly sourced material in an article or to relax normal standards of sourcing and citation.

I think this covers the main point without making the guidelines too granular to a specific topic area. Kirill [talk] [pf] 00:51, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
Beautiful. I like it. It says exactly what I was trying to get it to say but with half the words. I can support this, and I think phrased as such others can too. TomStar81 (Talk) 01:23, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
Anyone else want to weigh in on this before I take to the main WP:MILHIST page for support? Or, alternatively, do you think we should wait and hold a referendum on the addition with the coordinator elections in October? TomStar81 (Talk) 19:28, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
I don't think there's any need for a formal referendum; past MILMOS amendments have all been done through regular discussion, and introducing a more cumbersome process will inevitably bind us to follow it for all subsequent cases. Let's just propose this on the main project talk page and see if anyone has any objections. Kirill [talk] [pf] 04:49, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

(od) I've posted this on the main talk page to get the ball rolling for MILMOS inclusion.  Roger Davies talk 03:55, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Which I've now removed, cos it was already there :))  Roger Davies talk 04:05, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
Since this has now been archived off the page without any objections, I've added the text to the MILMOS. Kirill [talk] [pf] 14:40, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

WWI & WWII

One of my pet hates on Wikipedia is the use of the acronyms WWI & WWII when people mean World War I and World War II. I've been changing these where I see them, but in a discussion with someone recently I was unable to find the page/section that explains that these should not be used. My questions therefore are a) are these acceptable acronyms for use in article text? and b) if not, where is it written down that they should be avoided (and if it isn't can we add it to the style guide)?--Jackyd101 (talk) 22:46, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

While we often use acronyms for position names like "COS" for "Chief of Staff"—once they've been introduced as such in the article, e.g. "Chief of Staff (COS)"—I'd always avoid "WWI" and "WWII" as being pretty lazy; good shorthand for a discussion page but not encyclopedic. Offhand, though, I don't know if there's anything mentioned anywhere about not using them but I'd support including something to that effect if there isn't. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 22:56, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
To my knowledge there isn't anything on the books close to this, but I have used them in the Iowa articles as short hand to keep page sizes manageable. I'm open to discussion on the matter, though I favor the inclusion of WWI and WWII in our articles. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:17, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
I agree that 'WWI' and 'WWII' shouldn't be used, and also change these when I see them. WP:MOS states that "Avoid abbreviations when they would be confusing to the reader, interrupt the flow, or appear informal or lazy". You don't see 'WWI' or 'WWII' in serious books and there's no need to use them given that Wikipedia articles don't face particularly strict size constraints - the few extra words they involve won't blow out the size of an article. Nick-D (talk) 00:24, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
While the MOS passage Nick pointed out should cover it, we may want to add a part in MILMOS about it - it does seem very informal and lazy, and makes the article unprofessional. – Joe N 01:01, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Should sucessful FA nominators and other key editors be given an award?

This may seem self-interested/obsessed, but bear with me! In the last year I've had three successful FACs. While it's personally satisfying when an article passes its FAC, I have to confess to being disappointed that this normally doesn't lead to any formal congratulatory messages. As I think that I'm no more obsessed with baubles than the average editor, I suspect that I'm not the only FA nominator to feel this way. Could I suggest that when an article in the scope of our project passes its FA review that the nominator(s) and, where appropriate, any other significant contributers identified in the FAC, be presented with either an appropriate barnstar or the WikiChevrons? (and no, I don't want this to be retrospective!). Nick-D (talk) 00:33, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Heh, I'm not sure we need an award for every MilHist FA, the bronze star seems enough to me on an individual basis. However I agree we can do more within the project to recognise successful FACs. I haven't been bothered to search the archives but some time ago I proposed an "FA Ace" award, whereby major contributors to five (5) MilHist FAs would get a gong. Five/ace seemed appropriate because of the military connotation, and also because I couldn't recall many awards for achieving five of something (ACM goes in threes, for instance, and the Triple Crown has its own unique numeric progression). So I hereby again propose the "FA Ace" award for five MilHist FAs (design to be chosen when/if adopted) - and of course I would expect this to be retrospective to the time I first suggested it, so a few would qualify for it almost immediately (not mentioning any names)... ;-) Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 01:28, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
I see what your saying, but both plans fail to taken into account that an editors FAC contributions may be an attempt to earn a different award and the territory they are working in happens to overlap with ours. Therefore it would be in our best interest to consider asking those who have completed 5 FACs if there is a particular award they wish to receive for their work. Just a thought. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:16, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

The generic {{Featured Article Medal}} already exists for contributions to five FACs; it would be relatively easy to modify that for our purposes. Perhaps it could be limited specifically to people who nominate FACs, on the basis that the FAC process already filters out nominees who are not substantial contributors?  Roger Davies talk 03:37, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

The FAM appears to be for 3 or more FAs, whereas the FA Ace would be for minimum 5 (and obviously restricted to articles within MILHIST scope). Heh, you could even have upgrades with swords and so on, in the manner of ACM, if qualifying for 2 or more of the basic award. Don't have a prob with the nomination stipulation, that's part and parcel of things like the Four Award. Perhaps that might help negate Tom's concern with 'overlap'? On the other hand, will people have a problem if they get more awards? There's already overlap in WP where the same article/achievement can lead to more than one gong (e.g. a successful FAC might gain you a Four Award as well as count towards a Triple Crown). In any case, quite often it seems you have to nominate yourself and 'your' articles for those; the 'award committees' don't generally go round hunting for candidates like the MILHIST Coordinators do for ACM. Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 01:56, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Somewhat, but not really. My concern is more that some of our users may be active within our scope because they are attempting to win awards that have little do do with quantity of FACs produced and everything to do with a certain task force. For example, for a long time my editing in the project on the Iowa-class was done in hopes of earning the Chevrons. Initially my hope was to receive them for work on the Iowa class but no one came forward to bestow the chevrons on my talk page for work on the Iowas. Eventually I gave up on earning the chevrons for work on the Iowas and simply wished to receive the chevrons for any milhist related work. It was Roger who finally awarded me the chevrons, albeit for the Montana class FAC, but I received them about a year after I thought I would. In a similar vein I have remained active with battleships for the last few years because I have been trying to earn one of ships project's barnstars, but so far I have had no luck; I did not receive a ships barnstar for the Iowa FT nom, nor for any of the ACR I've done on ship article, or for the battleship drive I'm currently running. Another point of contention in the same vein is that a large number of our project members have reached a point where they have completed three FACs and as such are entitled to the FAM, but may not have received that award and as a result may be doing FAC work as a means of hinting that they are trying to get the FAM. Its this sort of of editing as a means of trying to hint at the award our editors may wish to receive that I am driving at: with 52 task forces, many of them run jointly by us and another project, the editor doing the article work may be pursuing some one else's award and their editing just happens to be to our project's advantage. This plan does not seem to take this aspect into account, and that worries me somewhat because it may be unintentionally hindering an editor from getting an award he or she is aiming for. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:31, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Notice of reduced activity

Effective tomorrow morning I start my fall school semester, and as a result will be editing at a reduced level until December. Given that I expect to graduate in December my plan at present is to conclude any major business I have on site and then, depending on my grades at the time, either take a long break and return sometime in December or remain on but active only in reduced capacity (ACR reviews, request for assessment, and other activities along those lines). TomStar81 (Talk) 23:44, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the notice, Tom. Good luck in your exams, and I wish you well! Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 00:59, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Ideas from Wikimania

I've been listening to some rather interesting presentations at Wikimania, and there are a number of ideas being brought up (in various contexts) that might be applicable to our project. These are obviously just rough thoughts at this point, but any comments on them would be very appreciated nevertheless.

  1. A point that's being made over and over is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for newer editors to easily find something they can do; redlinks are rarer, particularly in high-visibility articles, and the generic "edit this article" button doesn't really give any indication of what actually needs to be done. This obviously isn't a problem we can solve on a global scale, but one area in which I think we can easily improve is our open task listing. Currently, what we have is almost exclusively geared to the most experienced editors, from whose ranks we draw most of our high-end reviewers; there's very little there in terms of easy editing tasks, unless one can navigate through a few dozen categories at the end. One approach might entail, in general terms, subdividing the listing into "easy"/"medium"/"expert" (or some different terminology for the same concept); the first group might have categories/articles which need relatively easy fixes (e.g. wikification), the second group more complex tasks (e.g. adding citations), and the third things like FACs and FARs. Other approaches are equally possible, of course; but the general idea is that we ought to list more varied open tasks than just the current high-end reviews.
  2. One method the German Wikipedia uses for quality control is a process whereby recent changes and new page patrollers who find "bad" articles tag them with a template that refers them to a particular "editorial department" (essentially the German equivalent of WikiProjects) for further processing. Again, this isn't something we can do on a global scale; but would it be useful to (a) develop a similar tagging scheme we could offer the patrollers and (b) perhaps seek a bot to take newly tagged articles and leave notes about them on the project's talk page(s)?
  3. A number of comments were made about the difficulty of inviting editors to participate, and one suggestion was automatically identifying new contributors to a topic area. Would it be useful to get a bot to generate, say, lists of (new?) editors contributing to military history, so that we could then go through them and leave invitations to join the project?
  4. One area that Wikimedia is trying to focus on in general is setting strategic goals for the overall progress of the movement and the projects. We have our "goals" on the project page, but they're really more of a mission statement than concrete objectives; would it be a useful exercise to try and come up with, say, one-year, three-year, and five-year goals on a project level (such as a number of featured articles, completion of a certain article set, eliminating stubs, or whatever else we may want to pursue)? Other than providing some sort of concrete metric of progress beyond simply increasing article counts, this may be useful as both a motivational tool and a way of planning initiatives going forward.

I'll probably post more ideas over the next two days of the conference, but any thoughts on these would be welcome. Kirill [talk] [pf] 01:52, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Respectively:

  • We could create the three tier system you suggest and couple it with an academy course so our new users understand what to do when they get involved. A survey for feedback on how we could improve the project may produce some useful suggestions for implementation of this idea. On that note, I do seem to recall that we had a requested article field some time ago, if memory serves. We could look into dusting that off and reactivating it so our newcomers can find redlink articles to work on.
  • I like this idea, but where would we run it from? And if we do go in on it will we have to share the bot with any other wikiproejcts?
  • I was actually under the impression we already did this; I guess we do not :) This is an outstanding idea I think, well worth pursuing. I would also point out that we are moving to help the perceived gap from newbies to experienced guys with our attempt at getting the academy up and running. That has to count for something. If we embrace this idea an the above idea perhaps we should (re)establish our outreach department.
  • On this one I am against the idea of putting forth so many FA/GA/A articles at specific points of time; it comes across to me as a quota we are trying to get our members to reach. To be fair to our project we are constantly singled out as being at or near the #1 spot for articles, and our members already have high praise for going beyond the call of duty to cite, create, maintain, and expand our articles. I think adding a quota will adversely effect this aspect of our project.

Like all proposals though, I will bow to consensus on the matters, what the collective consensus may be. I'm looking forward to hear what other suggestions emerge, they are definitely interesting. TomStar81 (Talk) 02:38, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for those excellent points Kirill. In regards to point one, encouraging editors to 'think outside the box' (sorry about the cliche) for article topics could produce results. While there are now articles on most of the obvious topics for an very comprehensive encyclopedia to cover, Wikipedia doesn't face any of the traditional space constraints and anything which meets WP:N and WP:V is a good topic - I had lots of fun wrting two articles on obscure but important World War II convoy battles recently for instance and have two more in the works. A couple of pages from a high-density source like an official history can be all that's needed to write a B-class article, for example. Nick-D (talk) 02:55, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I created an invitation-welcome awhile back if anyone feels like using it/adapting it/moving it to the project space. I haven't used it in ages, so do what you want with it. User:the_ed17/Ed-MILHIST
I agree with Tom on the final point. A specific quote of GAs etc. would be, quite frankly, ridiculous for WikiProjects to implement. We are here to guide, assist and review—we don't make editors write! —Ed (Talk • Contribs) 03:13, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Perhaps the core problem is how to efffectively recruit, motivate and develop new editors. The key difficulty probably comes from the sprawling and catch-all nature of Milhist. All the research shows that new editors start off by editing subjects close to their hearts, and then move gradually (as they develop confidence) into related subjects. I think we may focus too much on Milhist as a concept and rather too little on the new editor's actual interests as reflected by our task forces.

    The idea of running a bot to find new editors working on our articles is very appealing. If the bot identified the TFs too, we could make invitations very specific and very attractive. "Hey! You've just edited an article on the Napoleonic wars. Did you know why have a whole task force devoted to this? You'll find other editors who share your interests and they can help with sources, images and so forth. You can join the Napoleonic task force here."

    The problem of giving editors things to do and keep them interested is solved if we can hook them into the task forces close to their hearts, rather into the rather anonymous and daunting Milhist. The task forces are all on a much more human scale; the lists of the jobs needing doing are shorter and less frightening. There's more incentive to make a mark. This does involve re-presenting the task force "articles needing attention to" categories. However, the names of the categories don't really flag instantly enough there are job to be done. I'd much rather than were called "XX articles needing copy-editing", "XX articles needing expanding", "XX articles needing images/info boxes" etc. Perhaps TF coordinators could jolly up things that need doing on TF talk pages or through individual messages. This could be reinforced by local (TF) drives on specific articles, rewarded with barnstars.

    This does involve taking a radically different decentralised approach but it will solve many problems.  Roger Davies talk 07:37, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Interesting food for thought.

  1. Agree completely, partly from my memory of looking for things to do when I first joined the site, and finding open task lists to be unhelpful, confusing, and beyond my limited scope (to the extent that I've never really bothered with them since). I think Tom's idea of linking them to academy courses where possible is excellent; we not only highlight things to fix but also show editors how to fix them.
  2. We already have something similar in Category:Military history articles needing attention - perhaps this could be developed further?
  3. This is a nice idea, but at 90,000+ articles one that I fear might rapidly overwhelm us. Although I'm not a bot writer, I can see a few potential issues with identifying every new editor to our articles, filtering out extraneous information (possibly such as IPs, minor fixes, vandalism reverts etc) and comparing the results with our membership list(s) to generate a list of potential new members. These would then need to be checked manually, as I think the last thing we'd want would be to annoy people by spamming them. We'd probably also need to maintain a second list of those who've already been invited, to avoid spamming them twice :) It could work, but I confess I'm sceptical. Some research on the amount of edits to our articles/the editors involved etc might be helpful in making an informed decsion.
  4. Like the others I'm wary of setting long-term project-wide goals, though perhaps for slightly different reasons. Most of our members don't participate in organised project activities (before being co-opted, I never had!), so whatever work is required to achieve any goals we set is likely to be picked up by the same core group of dedicated editors that do our article reviewing, contribute to the contest etc. I believe as a result other areas of the project will suffer, and the increased workload will become a chore and we'll run the risk of demotivating and perhaps losing good contributors. Setting short-term SMART-type targets works well in the task-forces where they are agreed on by a small self-selected group, but we might be courting failure to try long-term targets on a project-wide scale.

EyeSerenetalk 10:09, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

Fair point on over-stretching our resources with long-term goals, although the sorts of things I had in mind (e.g. FA counts) are the ones that tend to happen regardless. I understand the concern with turning it into a quota, but I wonder if there might be some way of setting milestones without producing that undesirable effect? Could we, for example, simply have a "progress to 500 FAs" bar without putting a date on it, just to give a visual indicator of progress? Or would that be seen as problematic as well?
Category:Military history articles needing attention is primarily populated by assessment-related parameters in the project banner; it's not really something we can expect the front-line edit patrollers to know or use. I was thinking something more along the lines of a simple article-space tag (e.g. {{military history attention}}) that the patrollers could slap on and use to pass the article to us without worrying about more precisely categorizing its problems.
Ed, that's a very nice welcome template. I wonder if we could trim off some of the generic boilerplate—new users don't really need links to the manual of style on their first day here, etc.—and generally make it a bit more "friendly" than what we have available right now? Kirill [talk] [pf] 12:28, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Yeah, you're probably right. Reducing the number of links would probably help, too; how many people actually go and read all of those? I'm not going to have time today to modify it, but if you or anyone else wants to have a go, do whatever you want with it. —Ed (Talk • Contribs) 12:40, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
As a tangent to the question of tracking milestones, the FA, etc. counts on the main project page seem a bit out of place simply tacked on to the introductory blurb. I played around with moving them under "Goals", but that doesn't really read any better; I wonder if it would be worthwhile to put the counts into a separate "Progress" block between "Goals" and "Structure", or something along these lines? Thoughts? Kirill [talk] [pf] 12:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Good points indeed! I agree with Tom and I'm more than convinced that with a properly implemented Academy we could solve most of these problems. The Academy should serve as a guide for all types of new members and direct them to the suitable/interesting task for each one. For example, a new inexperienced member might initially find tagging and assessment interesting, but once he becomes more familiar with wiki and our project the academy should guide him to new tasks, such as developing articles. Another important thing in my opinion for keeping members active and attracting new ones would be diversity, so we won't have editors leaving us due to routine activities. Once again, the academy should be constantly updated and lead everyone to our tasks (assessement, review, B-class checklists, contests, etc.). We have to deal as well with the current inactivity period and begin revigorating our project by creating motivating new contests and drives. For example, WikiProject Aviation Contest proved to be an excellent idea for attracting new users (I was impressed of how many users it attracted and decided to participate myself as well) - this was achieved mainly due to User:Trevor MacInnis' appropiate invitation placed on each member's talk page. I believe we should take this as an example and try to start few contests within our busiest task forces (WWII contest, US mil hist contest, etc). Such opportunities would maintain a permanent activity within our project and attract new members as well.
Regarding long term goals, I really don't believe that a realistic prevision could be made and an eventual future term respected. We should better focus presently on how we encourage our members to write valuable articles and assist them as much as we can through the FAC process (which sometimes becomes a test of nerves for less experienced editors). --Eurocopter (talk) 12:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Kirill: I don't see any problem at all with having something like a simple barometer or two marking our next FA/GA/A/whatever milestone; with no set time limit, that would be no-pressure motivation. If we combine that with your point about the article counts, we could kill two birds with one stone and, with a visual representation of the counts, remove the stats completely (or maybe put them in a footnote instead). I'd say a separate progress section would make sense. Also, point taken on using the milhist articles needing attention category; I hadn't really considered how it was populated. A mainspace article template would make more sense in this case, though it might be helpful if we could encourage a rationale to be included when it's used (maybe some parameters, or a text field similar to the prod template?), to give us an indication of why the article's been tagged.
Eurocopter: I agree very much with your point about diversity of tasks and the use of the academy to promote them. It's starting to shape up content-wise, but I think there's still an awful lot of work to be done in organising and editing material into actual courses. I've a number of ideas about this, but as always there's not enough hours in the day... EyeSerenetalk 13:23, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Of course there is a lot of work to be done, but if we want to reach our goals we have to do it. The first step would be organizing better our coordinator team, with a rotative system of clear assignments/tasks/responsabilities for each of us. --Eurocopter (talk) 13:34, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I can't find anything that displays progress bars as arbitrary data points rather than percentages, so I think it'd probably be confusing to remove the raw numbers entirely. In terms of what we can do, I've imported one of the French Wikipedia's progress bar templates (there's another, more complex one, that I'll work on shortly), and we can produce something like this:
Currently, there are 1512 featured articles, 149 featured lists, 41 featured topics, 544 featured pictures, 69 featured sounds, 5 featured portals, and 685 A-Class articles within the scope of the project.
Upcoming milestones:
...
Is this suitable for our needs? Kirill [talk] [pf] 14:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Yes, this could do. What's the next milestone for the number of our A-class articles? 200 seems quite close, though it could take a long time if a considerable number of FACs are passed... --Eurocopter (talk) 18:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I think that bar looks great and would be nice to have. I'm worried, however, about having an A-class progress bar: we try to promote A-Class as a stepping stone to FAC, so trying to get more A-Class articles might inadvertently reduce our numbers of FAs, since more A-Classes would not be making the final step. – Joe N 20:54, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
We could encourage more A-class articles by not offering a GA-class bar, done as such we may be able to increase the ACR content without adversely effecting either FA or A-class material. TomStar81 (Talk) 23:21, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
At the moment, we couldn't generate a GA bar anyways, since we don't track GAs in the showcase. The progress bar uses the showcase article counts, not the raw assessment ones, since the latter can't be automatically extracted from the assessment table. Kirill [talk] [pf] 02:37, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
The GA stats could probably just be taken from the appropiate section at WP:GA, but I agree that it would be best to focus on the FAs and As. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 03:03, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

(out) @Krill, I've made attempts to radically shorten User:The ed17/Ed-MILHIST. What do you think? —Ed (Talk • Contribs) 04:34, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Looks pretty good to me, Ed... Cheers, Ian Rose (talk) 04:52, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure that shortening it is necessarily the answer :) What would be good would an additional parameter (or parameters) that match the editor's interests (as expressed on the join-up page) to our task forces. Yes, this makes it a bit more complicated but it enables us to keep people by offering them things that relate specifically to their interests. Our huge range of task forces is a great strength but we consistently underplay/overlook it.  Roger Davies talk 07:44, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

Getting back to the milestone discussion above, I've created a "Progress" block on WP:MILHIST and added progress bars targeting 500 FAs and 1000 featured items overall. Are those good enough for our purposes, or do we want to set other milestones to track? Kirill [talk] [pf] 01:41, 31 August 2009 (UTC)

I think those look excellent Kirill. Other potential milestones:
  • Total number of articles? 100,000 is the obvious milestone
  • GAs? Might be worthwhile, stats at Wikipedia:GA#War and military but unless we can pick up those numbers with a bot it may have to be tracked manually
  • A-Class? As discussed above, often a pre-FAC stopover so possibly unsuitable
These are just ideas - you've already got the main two. EyeSerenetalk 08:34, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Upcoming elections

We need to fix the dates for inclusion in the upcoming Bugle. Unless anyone objects, the nominations for the next coordinator election will open on 5 September, with voting from 00:01 12 September to 23:59 26 September. I suggest we continue with the same system as last time: ie all candidates with twenty or more endorsements will be appointed, to a maximum of fifteen appointments.

 Roger Davies talk 02:25, 28 August 2009 (UTC)

That looks good to me. We should probably try and get some copyediting done on Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Being a coordinator before the election opens, since there's a lot of new material which has been added since the last one, and parts of it could use some cleanup. In particular, there are several sections which could be condensed quite a bit; we don't want to present potential candidates with pages of text when a few paragraphs might work just as well, since that'll just discourage them from reading the piece. Kirill [talk] [pf] 02:36, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
(ec)No complaints. One comment though: leave a link to the academy page on the coordinator election process. It may help inspire more people to run, and could also provide us with a test of the academy's potential. It may even help generate more essays for the academy. (Sorry for the coordinator page, too; I've been packing that page with advise the last few days.) TomStar81 (Talk) 02:39, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
No need to apologize about the additions; it's all good advice. We just need to polish the presentation a bit. :-) Kirill [talk] [pf] 02:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
No complaints here; it all sounds good to me. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 03:00, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
That looks good to me as well. Nick-D (talk) 01:21, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

Revitalizing task forces/coordinator roles

Perhaps the most pressing thing to do with "Being a coordinator" is to get the promise of what it contains closer to the reality :) I'll explain. Milhist is essentially a federation, with the wikiproject providing central services to the component task forces. Now the way that coordination is set up at the moment places all the emphasis on the central services without too much attention being given to the task forces. Sure, we provide lists of things that need doing and so forth, but there's very little personal interaction at TF level and little support and guidance for newbies. From this flows another point.
One of the things that has long bothered me is how underutilised Milhist coordinators actually are. Broadly, you're a bunch of focused, experienced, movitivated people who could provide great leadership. Instead, the bulk of Milhist coordinator activity is focused on stuff which could be performed by a sophisiticated bot :) You know, shunting file names around as articles are promoted and so forth. Now, this all needs doing, and indeed, it's what keeps the central services ticking over, but it would be better if coordinators took the helm at grass roots level. We've all seen, with Tom and his battleships, and JonCatalan with his tanks, what happens when task forces are inspired and led by coordinators working on topics they love. They punch many times above their weight. Getting the task forces properly functioning is a solution to many problems:
  1. task force outreach to new editors, with a specific list of things they can help with once recruited.
  2. providing a welcoming home for new editors, where they can find editors with similar interests;
  3. keeping track of articles relevant to the new editors, that need improving, in an environment where editors have the motivation, sources and knowledge to do so.
None of this is difficult to implement and post the next election would be a great time to do it.  Roger Davies talk 07:14, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I agree that the coordinators are underutilised, so would it also be worth rethinking some of the task-forces and coordinator roles?
  • As we know, most of the task forces see almost no activity, so perhaps some of them could be merged (for example, the almost inactive NZ & the more active Australian TFs)? Together with your point about more proactive coordination, this might help to invigorate some of our moribund areas.
  • We could assign specific coordinators to other areas of the project besides the TFs (perhaps in rotation as Eurocopter suggests above, though I think an extension of our current post-election free-for-all negotiations would do fine). I'm thinking of areas like reviewing, the Academy, our contests, the logistics dept, the newsletter etc. Although the current set-up works, having three coords per TF where there's for the most part very little to do, and large swathes of the rest of milhist run on an ad-hoc basis, doesn't seem to me to be making best use of our considerable pool of expertise. It further leaves some coords - perhaps for reasons as simple as being in a different time-zone to the majority - virtually unemployed. We have seen quite a few posts from new coords apologising for not being very active, often coupled with comments that they're unsure where they can contribute and when they find something, that another of us has got there first. Re the TF leadership point, there's also the consideration that some coords may not wish to take on a proactive leadership role in the TFs for whatever reason, and would rather concentrate in other areas where they feel more qualified.
Thoughts? EyeSerenetalk 08:43, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
Interesting points all. I suppose the key point about TFs, especially the moribund ones, is that with a bit of impetus, an easy to find list of tasks that need doing, and active recruitment, they probably wouldn't stay moribund :) WRT, the "proactive" aspects of TF coordination, much of this could actually be codified with templates, so it would not be much more demanding than present Milhist project stuff. (I'm out of the door now, but more on this later ....)  Roger Davies talk 09:33, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I think that there's little point to getting rid of less active task forces merely for the sake of doing so; most of them serve as useful organizational and social placeholders, if nothing else. (The only task force I would question, at the moment, would be the Taiwanese one.)
Beyond that, I think that pushing to revitalize our task forces is a good idea (although I wouldn't consider it a major change in philosophy or approach, as Roger does—task forces were always intended to act as decentralized article-work areas); but there are some points that I think we should keep in mind as we come up with a path forward:
  • The primary responsibility of the coordinators is to keep the core processes running smoothly; our work with task forces should not cause us to lose sight of that. In particular, I would recommend against any system where only certain coordinators are tasked with looking after these processes; every coordinator should remain prepared to step in and help maintain them as needed.
  • I don't think it's necessarily needed, or beneficial, to try and make all of the task forces active, at least initially. It may be more effective to select a subset and focus on them, so that the coordinators don't become spread too thin among multiple task forces. This is particularly the case if we have little or no bot support for this work.
  • The standard task force template already contains (or should contain) a lot of the information we need to provide incoming editors; it's probably worth looking at how that information might be better presented.
Kirill [talk] [pf] 14:31, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
  • Despite my suggestion above, personally I don't really regard having inactive TFs as a significant problem; as you say, they have an intrinsic value and may become active, though I think one important consideration is the effect on potential new members of visiting a TF they're interested in only to see the most recent talk-page post is many months old.
  • I totally subscribe to the "we all chip in as needed" approach in theory, but in practice it seems to have resulted in a few coords doing most of the work. Again that's fine where (as now) many of us are on breaks, because we've built redundancy into the system, but I'm trying to look at the role from the perspective of a coordinator who'd like to be more active but can rarely find an incomplete task or a niche that isn't already occupied by someone with more on-wiki time. I think parcelling out our core areas as well as the TFs would provide enough jobs to give everyone a valuable role (and make everyone feel valuable), and allow those of us who want to, to play more to our strengths. To try to address your specific concern, I'm not advocating exclusivity or ownership at all. I envisage the roles more as creating specific points of contact for certain areas who can help to coordinate efforts in those areas. This certainly wouldn't (and shouldn't) mean other coords can't act on their own initiative. EyeSerenetalk 18:38, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
←Personally, I think a large part of why our task forces - particularly some of the small ones - go largely unnoticed is that the other party is not holding up its half of the bargain. With a few exception almost every single task force we run is run jointly with at least one other project. For some reason, the other projects seem to endorse the creation of joint milhist task force and then forget the whole thing. In the case of the NZ task force, for example, WP:NZ has noever bother shoving any traffic to the page. Now I admit that this project exists to further the military history angle of many other projects, but the fact remain that there members are just as capable of helping with there respective milhist task forces as we are. It was for this reason that I proposed leaving messages on the talk pages for other projects that have established jointly run TFs with ours so as to (hopefully) try and help the other project members to take more of an interested in their military-based task forces. It was in this vein that after WP:FILMS held there most recent elections I having been assigned to the War films task force made a point of dropping by to say hello and to encourage their guys to ask questions of me so as to try and open the lines of communication more. It is not fair to our project that those task forces that are supposed to be run jointly by at least on other project end up being run almost exclusively by us. Frankly, I think that we should start requiring the other project to cough up interest members to military related task forces before we create any more so as to ensure that someone from the other project is going to be participating in them.
On the matter of "we all need to chip", that is true to, but I take a different view of the active vs. the inactive: "Never have so many owed so much to so few" :) An alternative, if I may suggest one, would be to have our new coordinators stick to articles reviewing and task force related work and have the more experienced coords rotate through the departments more expertise is required to effective handle the day-to-day ops. This would help split the work load, and could help improve the efficiency of the departments we run. In particular, the logistic department could do with oversight from the coordinators; as requests come in for copyedits, image fixes, JSTOR access and such the supervise coordinators can distribute messages to those who are listed as being open to assisting with a particular area of expertise. Just something to think about. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:37, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

Special Project for non-TFA main page articles within our scope?

By now it should be obvious that there are a number of dates with important milhist connotations - February 23, June 6, August 6, September 2, November 11, and December 7 to pick a few. Dates of this nature that see our content up on the anniversary box on the main page offer us a chance to showcase our articles without the need for an actual tfa, and I wonder if there would be any interest in generating a list of articles known to appear in the anniversary section and adding these to a subpage as a special project for our members to look out to see if we can not improve the articles in question to at least B-class, if not A or FA class, for their yearly pass through the section. Thoughts on this? Would it be a good idea, or is this something we should avoid? TomStar81 (Talk) 05:02, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

This might be a massive list, almost every single day I look at that section I see at least one or more articles linked which fall under our scope. Plus, are you thinking only the articles in bold, because we usually get three or four articles linked for one hook there to give the proper context. -MBK004 05:15, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm thinking everything, the bold and the unbold. I do not expect that this is going to be a fast thing or an easy thing for that matter; what I have in mind is that this could be something for the project members to work on if they find a moment or two. And another consideration is that the articles rotate so there is no guarantee that whats up this year will be up again next year. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:44, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
This would be an absolutely huge list and a mammoth task to undertake. If we are to go ahead with this, then I suggest we limit it to the larger, more important articles at least initially, so we can get some kind of feel of it first and editors are probably less likely to contribute when there is a massive list of things to do, as opposed to a somewhat restricted one. Cheers, Abraham, B.S. (talk) 00:26, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I agree with you there, but if we break this down by task force we can see about encouraging some independent initiate from their members. A large list is apt to have a put off effect, but not all TFs can lay claim to all subjects. Just a thought. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:41, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Maybe I'm missing something, but if the events linked are (liable to be) chosen anew every year, then which articles are we actually going to focus on? Any event article could, potentially, be chosen for an anniversary entry, and if we include the other context articles, we're really looking at improving just about everything in our scope. This is a good thing to do, of course, but it's basically the purpose of the project to begin with, not something suited for a special effort.
A more reasonable set of goals, I think, might be to improve (a) the anniversary entries on Portal:War and (b) the articles linked from them, since the selection there is actually under our control. Kirill [talk] [pf] 00:51, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I concede a point that the selection changes ever year, but I have noticed that certain important moments tend to remain despite the changes; for example, February 23 usually includes the Iowa Jima flag raising, June 6 a mention of the Normandy Operations, August 6 the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, September 2 the surrender of the Empire of Japan aboard Missouri, November 11 the armistice ending World War I, and December 7 the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Now to be fair, some of these articles are obvious - World War II for example has god only knows how many spots in the anniversary cue - and some of those are already covered by the top ten team - WWII and the atomic bombings, for example, are already being worked on - but there are other less obvious ones that probably show up just as frequently. I do grant that there are others, and I do grant that the selected anniversaries change from year to year, but major events like this usually carry over and that's why I brought up the point. If we could work on those articles known to carry over we could ensure that they improve for main page displays. The catch would be fishing the articles known to carry over out of what is essentially a catch and release stream so we know which articles in general will appear near continuously in the selected anniversary tab. If we could identify these articles then this idea/plan/proposal of mine would kick in. TomStar81 (Talk) 01:59, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
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