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Elections

Following on from the discussion above, are we agreed to expand the number of coordinators to nine? Or should this at minimum be put to the project as a whole?

Also, based on previous examples, the nomination period would run from 1 August to 14 August, and the actual election from 15 August to 28 August. Does this seem problematic to anyone? Carom 22:16, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

It should really be brought up before the project, if only in the "does anyone object to this" form. Presumably, to save effort, we can present the proposed dates at the same time.
As far as the dates themselves, I don't have any problems with these. Kirill 23:54, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Just go ahead. Wandalstouring 11:06, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, brought it up at WT:MILHIST#Upcoming coordinator elections. Kirill 13:52, 18 July 2007 (UTC)

The election page is now ready here; I'd appreciate if someone else could look over it and check to see that I didn't make any obvious mistakes in setting it up. Kirill 20:21, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

Everything seems to be in order. Carom 20:34, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
I see no problems what so ever. Kyriakos 21:31, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
To keep everyone in the loop, I've put up the election banner and made an announcement on the main talk page. I've also asked Grafikm_fr to send out a message to everyone on the member list, but I'm not sure if/when he'll be able to do that, as he's been less active recently; we may want to look at getting access to another bot operator for this and the newsletters, to avoid shoving everything off onto one person. Kirill 18:48, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Given that Grafikm seems to be inactive, I think we need to find another method of distributing these messages if we're going to try for a good level of participation in the election. Offhand, does anyone know of, or have access to, a bot or AWB user that might be willing to help out with this? Kirill 14:56, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
Ask User: PocklingtonDan and if the task is really simple I can do it. Wandalstouring 16:02, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
It's basically a question of taking every user on the list of active project members and leaving them a (standard) talk page message. It can be done with regular AWB (or even by hand), but given that we have ~600 users to go through, I'm unsure if anyone would have the time to do so. Kirill 17:03, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
Maybe we can split it up between some of use. Someone does 100 or etc, etc. Kyriakos 22:00, 5 August 2007 (UTC)
What does the message look like. I can copy and paste 200 members, Kyriakos another 200 and you 200 and the issue is solved. Wandalstouring 12:29, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
I suppose that will have to do. The message is supposed to be as follows:
The Military history WikiProject coordinator selection process is starting. We are looking to elect nine coordinators to serve for the next six months; if you are interested in running, please sign up here by August 14!
Kirill 13:42, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've started from the top of the list; I'll see how far I get tonight. Kirill 02:27, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
I've done the first 400 (up through Mmx1); if someone could do the remaining 200, I'd be very grateful. Kirill 03:49, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
I did some up to N328KF. I will do some later tonight when I have some more time. Kyriakos 08:13, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
I did till number 529. Wandalstouring 10:28, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
OK. The jobs finnaly done. Kyriakos 12:23, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone!
(We'll need to do this again for the "start of voting" message, I'm guessing; I don't know if we'll find a bot to do it by that point. We should definitely look at getting a replacement bot in time for the next newsletter to go out, though.) Kirill 13:44, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay, now that the voting is open, we'll need to repeat the above with a second message:

The Military history WikiProject coordinator election has begun. We will be selecting nine coordinators from a pool of fourteen candidates to serve for the next six months. Please vote here by August 28!

I'll try to do a large run today or tomorrow, but any assistance would obviously be very welcome! :-) Kirill 00:22, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

626 till 540 Wandalstouring 09:41, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
1 to 120 Wandalstouring 09:15, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
120 to 220 Kirill 01:24, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
300 (the comic is far better than the movie) Wandalstouring 08:39, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
380 Kirill 17:43, 18 August 2007 (UTC)
Up to 500 done now; just 500 to 540 remaining, presumably. Kirill 01:32, 21 August 2007 (UTC)
And finally done. Kirill 01:36, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

coordinating coordinators

I suggest the new coordinators to form groups who are concerned with specific tasks. This way the work rests on more than shoulders and can run smoothly, even if some go on wikibreak. Wandalstouring 10:15, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Ditto. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 04:25, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Status report for August 27

In anticipation of the refreshed force of coordinators, I've tried my hand at collecting the threads of some of the outstanding tasks, ideas, and so forth.

Without further ado:

  1. Assessment drive
    The assessment drive seems to be proceeding, albeit quite slowly (mostly, I suspect, due to a fairly small number of participants). Are there any easy ways to attract more people to it? WPBIO seems to have had a bit more success (although their setup was easier, since it only required assessment, not scope sorting).
  2. Stress hotline
    I've made an attempt at creating a basic skeleton for the stress hotline discussion area that Wandalstouring had proposed a while back. I don't really know how we should proceed from here; presumably we'll want to link or advertise it, but how do we actually run the thing?
  3. Infobox conversion
    The infobox conversion drive hasn't really left the planning stages. It's something we ought to get to, though. The difficult part is largely figuring out how different parameters map; if that's done cleanly, I think there are bots or AWB users that can carry out the actual substitutions.
  4. Navigation templates
    {{military navigation}} is basically ready to go; I think I've ironed out most of the obvious problems with using {{navbox generic}} as a base (or at least come up with workarounds). There are a few parameters I've omitted, mainly for stylistic reasons; the chief one is the built-in image field. If it's really needed, we can always support it, but it'll only work on the full-width templates. At this point, I think it's pretty safe to start converting various old-style military-related navigation templates as we see them; I'm not sure if a more systematic effort would be worthwhile, or if we should just spread the new template bit by bit.
  5. OOB templates
    There was a request made some time ago for a standardized template to use for order-of-battle articles. Given the ever-growing number of these we seem to be developing, I'm wondering if this might not be a useful thing to create. I have no idea what it should look like at this point, though, since I haven't seen any really well-designed OOBs. Anyone have a favorite example we could work from?
  6. Project consolidation
    It may be worthwhile, at this point, to try and merge some of the more catatonic small WikiProjects into task forces and such. Some candidates:
  7. Reference desk
    A random idea I saw being floated around somewhere: would it be either feasible or worthwhile to organize a military reference desk (under WP:REFDESK) to handle reader/editor requests for information? I'm not sure what this would entail in practice—presumably we'd want some way of funneling military-related questions from the main desks—but I wanted to bounce the idea around before spending too much time fiddling with it.

Comments on these, or any other matter, would be very welcome and highly appreciated! Kirill 02:58, 28 August 2007 (UTC)

Taken one at a time:
  1. One thing that may have helped the WP:BIO drive is the offer of rewards. However, I don't want to attract editors who will hurry through 5000 articles in order to win a Golden Wiki Award, if that means that there will also be lots of mistakes.
  2. I think the simplest way to run this will involve a handful of editors volunteering to "staff" it for some sort of trial period - we won't really know how it works until it goes into practice.
  3. Presumably we can work out the nitty-gritty of the template replacements on the talk page of that effort (if only to avoid fragmenting discussion)?
  4. I think spreading this on an ad-hoc basis is probably best.
  5. Nothing to say here, really. I'm not convinced that extensive OOB's are really good or necessary, and I also haven't seen one that really, really worked well.
  6. I think these could, from our perspective, all be merged as you outlined.
  7. I don't know if this last point is a good idea or not. There was some resistance on the RefDesks this past spring to the idea of creating more desks, and I'm not sure I want to get involved in any kind of dispute with the "regulars" of that forum. Do you have a link to places this idea has been brought up?
Another matter: the contest department seems to be rolling along fairly nicely - do we want to do some awards for people like Kevin Meyers and Climie.ca, who have consistently ended up high on the table? Carom 03:13, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
7. I don't recall exactly where I saw this, actually; I think it may have been another WikiProject, but it didn't occur to me at the time to note the place.
As far as the contest: I handed out some WikiChevrons to the winners last month, on a personal basis, but we haven't had any formal recognition beyond the newsletter mentions. Do we want to set up something like that? (We can, I think, carry on with personal awards as a standby in the absence of a better idea; but, as we're going to be coming up on the six-month mark, it may be a good idea to introduce something new at this point.)
Kirill 03:20, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
(Not a coordinator anymore, but just chipping in my $0.02) #7 is a great idea. If the RD won't let us, we can make our own. ;) -- Миборовский 03:44, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
Wow. Good stuff. Always plugging ahead with new ideas, eh? I think that absorbing these defunct wikiprojects is a fine idea. As for the Castles, it may be a bit complicated. I think we should definitely leave some comments over at the project's talk page, see what other people over there think about the defunct or non-defunct status of the project, and about the feasibility of the move. A task force devoted to it could be fine, as we do after all have a number of other non-geographical task forces that overlap with the geographical ones quite peacefully. ... I guess this is a bridge we don't need to cross yet, but I think we should also consider whether we want to keep it as "castles" or expand it to "military fortifications" or "military structures". (As the word "castle" can be kind of iffy in its application to non-Western topics, this may be best anyway, as "military fortifications" or "structures" would better encapsulate things like East Asian wooden/earthwork structures, the Great Wall, pre-Columbian American fortifications, early colonial fortifications, etc) LordAmeth 13:36, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
I'd have no objections to a broader task force on fortification, but I vaguely recall that particular idea being rejected by the editors that wanted to work specifically on castles. I don't know whether the answer would be different now than it was then; it's certainly something we could consider, in any case. Kirill 05:09, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
As an aside, if anyone hasn't commented on WT:MILHIST#Flag use in infoboxes and has an opinion on the matter, please drop by that thread; it's sort of stalled, unfortunately, and I'd like to get something useful out of it before it drops off into the oblivion of our archives. ;-) Kirill 05:09, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

So, any other comments? (I was sort of hoping we could get some opinions from the new coordinators before starting to move forward on these. ;-) Kirill 05:56, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm here (would have been here sooner if this week hadn't been so screwed up :) Respectively:

  1. I concur with the idea that offering some sort of award would likely help inspire more people to participate, but it may also be worth the time to take a sampling of public opinion within our project to see why exactly people haven't been particiapting; it may be that part of the problem is people are uniformed about to participate in it, or are uncertain of how to go about filling out the associated paperwork.
  2. Yes, we need to move forward with this idea. Immediately. Before we lose even more contributers. I would suggest that we also make state that those who have resigned either from the project in particular or wikipedia as a whole are welcome on the page (sorta like the accident forgiveness thing that state farm has been pitching). Who knows, we maybe be able to win some contributers back.
  3. Abstaining from comment for the moment. I am not familar with the particulars of this one yet, and don't want to committe to something without knowing what it is I'm agreeing to.
  4. Abstain as per previous answer.
  5. Yes, its a good idea, and no, I haven't seen a good example (yet).
  6. Merge as per suggestion.
  7. I think that would be a good idea. I also think it would compliment the contact system we have setup; if the RD idea fails to go through we could pair military-related questions with users who have taken up contacts for the particular field to which the question may be classified.

Thats my take on the suggestions. TomStar81 (Talk) 07:11, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

A brief update:
  • I've left merger/archival proposal messages with the Colditz, GulfWars, Falklands War, War of the Pacific, and Victoria Cross projects. Hopefully there won't be any objections and we'll be able to go ahead with this. I've left Castles alone for now, as that will probably require some more complex work; we're looking at a new task force if they accept to be merged in.
  • I've added links to the stress hotline in a number of places, including the project navigation box. We should presumably announce it to the project as a whole at this point?
  • I added a few more templates to the infobox conversion planning page, and linked the page itself from the announcement template. I'll start looking at how each infobox converts over; assistance would be appreciated.
On an unrelated note, there's an award nomination up that could use a few more people looking at it. :-) Kirill 03:19, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Further update: I've presented the stress hotline to the project at WT:MILHIST#Project stress hotline. Now I guess we wait and see what kind of response we get. ;-) Kirill 01:46, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Assessment motivation

Why not just dish out gongs for articles assessed? Perhaps have an overall assessment award, with an increasing number of stars, say incrementing every 250 or 500 articles assessed. Broadly, this project seems a bit stingy with awards and new ones would go down well. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

I got the thinking about this problem the other day; psychology tells me that people are more willing to work if they feel there is something in it for them. Given that we are a military hostory project, perhaps we could create some sort of in house distinguished service award for assements and A-class review and such. If its unique to the project and issued only certain circumstances then the only way to get the award would be to jump on the band wagon and help with the given task(s). I already left a query on Kirill's talk page about creating an A-class award for use across wikipedia (ie, for us and any other project using A-class rank), and I agree with your sentiment about the project being stingy with awards. That was one of the reasons why I suggest the chevrons w/oak leaves answer to a higher calling; I hoped it would inspire people to work a little harder on project articles (and provide some incentive for being a coordinator for the project), but I am nit sure its working. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:30, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
It's a good idea, certainly. As a practical matter, I'd suggest coming up with something like clasps for the existing award(s) rather than an entirely new award image; that way, we don't have to go through the entire long "come up with an image that everyone likes" process every time we need an award for work in some particular area. Kirill 15:10, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
(As an aside on stinginess: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Awards often has nominations sitting for a considerable time waiting for input from coordinators. ;-) Kirill 15:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
I recall clasps being the subject of discussion sometime last year, when the idea of additional awards was first broached. I think this is a fairly neat solution - do we want to come up with a handful of likely areas for clasps, find some images, and then go from there? Carom 16:17, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Forgive my stupidity, but what pray tell is a clasp? (I am fairly certain we aren't alking about the thing that keeps my tie attached to my shirt). Also, if we are having trouble on with coordinator input on pages like Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Awards then would it be worth our time to generate a list of pages that coordinators should add to their checklists if they get voted in? Or, alternatively, would it be worth out time to engineer a bot to keep coordinaters abreast of devloping siutuations on project related pages? TomStar81 (Talk) 19:50, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
The clasps I'm referring to are medal bars. I think someone actually came up with a way to stick one onto the existing Chevrons, but I can't recall where that image was.
As for needed input, I'm sort of hoping that between the list of open tasks at the top of this page and the status reports that occasionally appear at the bottom, we'll be able to keep everyone more or less on top of things. ;-) Kirill 20:23, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Kirill, I think the relevant discussion is this one, although I could be mistaken. Carom 21:50, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that does seem like the right discussion. Looking at some of the stuff there, I think what I was remembering was the clasp here, which is placed on the ribbon rather than the full award; we'd probably need to widen it to make it work for the Chevrons themselves. On the good side, a simple lettered clasp shouldn't be too difficult to make arbitrarily many versions for. Kirill 23:54, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the clarification on clasps, I see what we are talking about now. I'm all for it; it sounds like a good idea. AS for coming up with likely areas for clasps: we already have a few areas (like A-class review and assessment of articles) that we could create clasps for, and I am sure that the task forces that focus on particular areas could suggest spots where clasps could be awarded as well. It may also be worth looking into creating a clasp for each individual task force; although that would admitedly be a lot of work, it would allow the task forces to custom the generic chevrons with an idividual twist, and possibly inspire more people to hand out awards (although as I noted, this would be alot of work). TomStar81 (Talk) 23:11, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
The clasps can use a common background image, so it'd be a matter of creating X different versions with altered text. It'd be somewhat time-consuming, but not difficult, I think. Kirill 23:54, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

In the meantime, how about something like this, for 250+ articles? We could substitute the WikiChevrons for the Chevrons w/Oak Leaves for 1,000 plus articles, and maybe Oakleaves with Swords for 2,500 articles.

Military History 2007 Assessment Drive
Message goes here --ROGER DAVIES TALK 18:52, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
I have no problems with using that—although I don't particularly see the need for a box around the thing—but I do object quite strongly to the idea of handing out the WikiChevrons w/ Oak Leaves on a purely numerical basis. The intent of having an entirely separate second level of the award was to create something which would be "special", and would be awarded for truly outstanding work, not merely to create a more complicated image.
If we need something particular for higher assessment numbers—and I'm not convinced we need multiple awards here, in any case—then clasps or service stars would be better. Kirill 19:04, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Question: assessments

Incidentally, what's the procedure when an article already has a higher than B-class status given by another project? History of cannon for instance is unassessed for Milhist purposes but is GA in History. Is it just given a Milhist GA or what? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:21, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

To my knowlage a GA-class article is not an in house ranking but a Wikipedia wide ranking, so unless I am mistaken it would be GA-class for our project purposes. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:32, 8 September 2007 (UTC)
Yep, GA and FA are determined by outside reviews, and any project can just mirror them. The only higher ranking that we don't automatically copy is A-Class, since we have our own review for that. Kirill 15:08, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, both. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:19, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps we need to note this over on the assessment chart; something to the effect that GA class articles are aforded full faith and credit by all projects, not just ours. If one person asks, then others have probably thought of it too. TomStar81 (Talk) 23:15, 8 September 2007 (UTC)

contacts

just a short inquiry. Who is going to maintain the contacts or should they be mothballed? Wandalstouring 11:43, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Mmm, I suppose the first question to consider would be whether the contacts program, as currently set up, is working as intended. Personally, I don't think the results have been all that great—there seems to be little interest among the project membership in either being contacts or approaching the contacts directly—but maybe I just haven't seen the functioning parts. Kirill 16:36, 9 September 2007 (UTC)

Status report for September 10

I'll be trying to keep these to a more regular schedule now; there's likely to be some repetition of matters brought up above. ;-)

First, a rehash of some matters from the last report:

1. Assessment drive

I've proposed the "clasp" idea for more specialized versions of the WikiChevrons to the project at WT:MILHIST#Award clasps and reference desks; depending on the feedback, we may be able to get something like that in the reasonable future. In the interim, I think that Roger's idea of using the regular WikiChevrons for assessing 250+ articles is a good one. I'm not quite sure what a good way of tracking that might be; do we just want to announce the availability of the award and let people report their own progress?

2. Infobox conversion

I've added several more infoboxes that need to be converted, but haven't had the time to start going through the parameter mappings. Help from anyone familiar with the arcana of template design would be welcome! ;-)

3. Project consolidation

As noted, I left messages with all the projects except for Castles; so far, we have positive responses for the VC and GulfWars projects, and no response from the others. I think we'll be able to get these merges completed in about a week or so. I'm still not sure how best to proceed with approaching Castles, though, since it's not quite clear what exactly we want to propose to them.

4. Reference desk

I've proposed the idea to the project at WT:MILHIST#Award clasps and reference desks; I suppose we'll just have to wait and see what people think.

And one new matter:

5. Subject-area contacts

Going off Wandalstouring's and Piotrus's questions, how do we want to proceed with this program? Is it functioning and/or maintainable? If not, can we fix it in some reasonable manner?

Comments on these issues, or any other matters, would be very welcome! Kirill 00:55, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

With the Project consolidation I think you are going a great job. And with WP:CASTLES I think should ask for a merge and transform the WP into a taskforce in this Project. Maybe a Task Force Castle or Fortifications. And also we should ask for a merge with WP:Scottish Castles. Otherwise I think we are going well with other issues. Kyriakos 02:19, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
On a related note, User:Buckshot06 asked me earlier how best to integrate the Rus & Sov TF with the Russian wikiproject. Thoughts? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 19:09, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Would be easy enough to do; but the reason we haven't done so in the past is because we weren't sure which project (i.e. Russia, SU, or Russian history) to work with. If we could get a clear answer on how those projects interact, we could go ahead and make the task force joint with whichever one was best. Kirill 16:39, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, duly passed on. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 11:24, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Pardon my intrusion. There is no clear answer to that one; the various Russian projects are starting what appears to be a very slow discussion over possible pulling themselves into a more coherent grouping. I made the last comment on this at WP:RUSSIA talk. Buckshot06 18:49, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
On the issue of Subject-Area contacts: If we establish an in house reference desk we could inactivate the contact page; I would assume experts on the subjects brought up in such a page would respond to questions asked there if given the chance. We could the primary project member list to pair questions with people who may have an answers here. In this manner, we can preserve the essence of the contact idea if nothing else. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:10, 11 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I suppose that could work, assuming the reference desk idea gets off the ground.
On a largely unrelated note, there are several proposed guideline discussions on the main talk page (notably the flag icon & pop culture ones) that could use some more people commenting, if only to start the discussion back up again. If anyone here has an opinion on those topics and hasn't expressed it yet, please do stop by those threads. :-) Kirill 01:40, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Update on project mergers: all the projects aside from Castles have now been dealt with as proposed. Kirill 21:16, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
I've also presented the task force idea to the Castles project at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Castles#Becoming a MILHIST task force?. Kirill 22:31, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
Nice work with the mergers Kirill. Hopefully Castles accept. Kyriakos 21:41, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

Assessment drive

I've been wondering about ways to get people to get behind the Assessment Drive. It might be feasible to do something within the Contest Department, with a separate table for tagging. Perhaps invite editors to adopt their own range (say 134,001-135,000) and then report progress monthly. This would make it easy to keep track of their tallies and dish out gongs accordingly. I did some sobering sums on this: each assessment takes about a minute, so doing the lot would keep someone in full-time work for nearly two years.--ROGER DAVIES TALK 19:09, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
Any specific reactions? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
More on assessment. Between 5%-10% of the basic list is false positive (mostly sportspeople, radio stations, and geographical features) generated from the inclusion of southern states into a Confederate States category. Examples:
  1. Spanish_missions_in_Florida (talk) via ROOT to Military to Military_history to Military_history_by_country to Military_history_of_the_United_States to Military_operations_involving_the_United_States to Wars_involving_the_United_States to American_Civil_War to Political_history_of_the_American_Civil_War to Confederate_States_of_America to Confederate_states_(1861-1865) to Georgia_(U.S._state) to History_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
  2. Fox_Chase_(SEPTA_station) (talk) via ROOT to Military to Military_history to Military_history_by_country to Military_history_of_the_United_States to Military_operations_involving_the_United_States to Wars_involving_the_United_States to American_Civil_War to Political_history_of_the_American_Civil_War to Confederate_States_of_America to Confederate_states_(1861-1865) to South_Carolina to Transportation_in_South_Carolina to South_Carolina_railroads to Norfolk_Southern_Railway to Conrail to Reading_Company to Stations_along_Reading_Company_lines
  3. Great_Smoky_Mountains (talk) via ROOT to Military to Military_history to Military_history_by_country to Military_history_of_the_United_States to Military_operations_involving_the_United_States to Wars_involving_the_United_States to American_Civil_War to Political_history_of_the_American_Civil_War to Confederate_States_of_America to Confederate_states_(1861-1865) to North_Carolina to Geography_of_North_Carolina to Landforms_of_North_Carolina to Mountain_ranges_of_North_Carolina
I'm not sure what (if anything) to do about it or, indeed, at this stage, what can be done about it. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 19:09, 14 September 2007 (UTC)
It is, I think already known that a large portion of the list is false positives...the intent was to cast the net broadly in order to tag everything that falls within the scope of the project. More precisely, we don't have any real handle on how many articles there are that fall within the scope of the project, and the purpose of the drive is twofold: to tag every article that falls under the scope, and then to assess it according to the criteria established by the project. Really, then, we don't want to do anything about false positives, except remove them from the list as we progress through each section. Carom 04:11, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Anyway, this assessement and tagging drive is a job for old chinese men. I think that it really needs more advertisement so people would come and help. In this moment, there are only 14 users oficially involved in this drive. In conclusion, I propose leaving a note on each WPMILHIST member talk page, in which they would be invited to join the effort. Any thoughts? --Eurocopter tigre 13:11, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
> Carom. the point I was trying to make (and failing miserably) here is that a large number of the false positives - say 8,000-15,000 entries - derive from one particular category. It will take a huge amount of time (say, 130-250 hours) to remove these manually. This is tedious and disheartening and it seems to me that it could usefully be done by a bot. Is this practical?
> Eurotigre. That's certainly one option, but perhaps as part of a package of initiatives, i.e some kind of gong and perhaps the contest I suggested above. The fact remains that there are 150,000+ entries to go through and that's a huge project. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:35, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Ah, I take your point now...best to ask Kirill, as he's the one who wrote the script that produced the worklists. Carom 17:38, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes Roger, I completely agree with you. But, in my opinion, it will take a looong time while 14 people will assess so many articles. So, if we continue with this strategy, the 2007 assessement drive will be finished sometime in 2012... Anyway, I'd like to hear Kirill's opinion. --Eurocopter tigre 22:40, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
Some responses:
  • I have no objections to a mass call for action.
  • As far as filtering out the false positives, I unfortunately have no way of doing that to existing lists. The only option would be to re-run the list-generating script and throw out the major known false-positive categories in that; but this would involve generating a whole new set of pages. Whether that's worth it, I don't know; but if we are to do something like that, I'd really appreciate a list of categories that shouldn't be examined by the script.
Kirill 23:22, 15 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't know whether it's worth it either. Not least, because of the amount of your time it would take. I can't help feeling that this drive is altogether too ambitious. If it is to be completed, we will need to get right behind it and get people motivated. (For instance, it could be cracked in a month if 150 people did 1000 assessments each, at say fifty a day.) Against that, it would be a huge drain on resources, which might be better (and certainly more pleasantly) employed working on creating and improving articles etc. That said, about 10% of the entries turn out to be new articles for Milhist. Many of these are ship-related or bio-related and are already part of those projects. Would it be possible to re-run the script concentrating just on those two WikiProjects. This would give us a smaller but tighter targetted list. Sorry if this posting covers too much ground. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 11:24, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that's a fine idea as it stands but I don't think - on its own - it goes anywhere near far enough. We need to do whatever it takes to get 150 people involved and motivated and then reward them for their efforts (with service clasps, stars, chevrons etc). These do not necessarily have to be deadly serious gongs ("I survived the Assessment Drive 2007" mini-chevrons for instance, might be fun.) So I think we need to work out the secondary things and then announce the whole thing as a package with individual invitations to participate. We can't just rely on the usual suspects to get this done, it's far too big a project. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 17:09, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, I'll try to work on putting together some suitable images for the bell and whistles aspects once I get a bit of free time; but, given the very limited extent of my artistic abilities, it'd be nice if someone more accomplished in this area could be found to do it. ;-) Kirill 12:48, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Why not run a competition? Get the others involved? That'd be fun, too! --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:46, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

Manual of Style

I've been involved in a discussion regarding the role of WikiProjects in the FAC criteria (Wikipedia talk:Featured article criteria#Unsure about #2). The upshot seems to be that WikiProject guidelines will not be considered to have "official" weight unless they're part of the WP:MOS. In light of that, I'm moving towards proposing a setup where we:

  1. Move our existing guidelines to a subpage.
  2. Redirect the subpage's talk page to the main project page, to retain a single place for discussion.
  3. Move forwards on getting community consensus to tag said subpage as a part of the formal MoS.

Does anyone see any reason why this would be a bad approach? Kirill 23:22, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

No, I don't. I've been following the discussion a little, and this seems like a reasonable approach from our end. Carom 03:47, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
I don't either. I glanced through it just now, albeit quickly, and I think that the idea is good, particular for the long run. If we add our guideliens to the parent MoS page then they should gain an additional measure of credability. One question though: what if our guidelines (or any other other project guideliens) change? Does this mean we have to work through MoS to get our in house guidelines change, or would we still retain control over our guidelines on a MoS page? TomStar81 (Talk) 06:43, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
As far as I know, changes to subsidiary MoS pages are typically done via consensus on the associated talk page, which in this case would be the project's main talk page. So I think, in practice, the project would be able to modify the guidelines at will (at least so long as we don't try to impose something outrageous). Kirill 17:16, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
I've started up the broader discussion at WT:MILHIST#Project style guide and MoS; hopefully we'll be able to move forwards on this in the near future. Kirill 17:29, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

Stress Hotline

I got the thinking about this just now, while reading over the infobox on our stress hotline page: obviously, editers having problems with our MILHIST articles will (hopefully) seek some comfort on the page, but what about MILHIST editers who are getting flak from other projects/task forces they may or may not be invloved? If one of our guys has issues with a video game related article, or philosophy article, or something to that extent, can he or she complain and vent on our stress hotline page, and if so should we note that on the main stress hotline page? TomStar81 (Talk) 22:30, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

People can vent on any topic they desire, yes; but I think we need to draw a subtle distinction between venting and asking for help. There's a distinction between a rant and a call to arms, in other words; "I'm having lots of trouble with project X and am really stressed" belongs on the stress hotline, while "Project X is causing trouble, we need to deal with them" is properly the province of the project's regular talk page(s). I'm not sure if this is worth putting into writing, though. Kirill 01:07, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

Status report for September 23

First off, I'd like to express my thanks to the assistant coordinators, who have been capably taking over a lot of the tasks I used to do myself. Pretty soon, you guys won't need me at all! ;-)

More generally, some of the matters that have come up over the last two weeks:

  1. Project consolidation
    The bulk of this has taken place successfully. There are a few remaining stragglers: Castles, whom I have approached regarding a merger (with no response so far), and Arab-Israeli conflict, which is a hornet's nest that I don't particularly want to touch at the moment.
  2. Manual of Style
    The discussion seems to be proceeding, albeit slowly. Now that the bulk of the guidelines are on a separate subpage, the remaining matter is largely one of being able to declare a sufficient consensus to stick a {{style-guideline}} tag on it. Presumably we should bring up the matter on WP:VP at some point in the near future? I don't really foresee many objections to this, though.
  3. Infobox conversion
    I've made an attempt at going through some of the more reasonable parameter conversions. Overall, the infoboxes can be divided into three categories:
    • The easy conversions: I've drawn up the parameter matching lists for the bulk of these, so presumably they can be started on.
    • The conversions we can't do yet: there are some infoboxes which include parameters we don't support (in particular, airport-related ones); we'll need some more work before they can be dealt with.
    • The conversions I can't figure out: this is basically the Submarine to Ship conversion. Really, someone familiar with how the ship infobox works needs to take a look at that one.
  4. Assessment drive
    We have, I think, two open issues here:
    • Awards: I haven't had time to draw up any clasps or such things yet; if anyone else wants to take a stab at them, they should feel free. We don't have many in-house graphics experts, unfortunately.
    • Redoing the lists: do we want to recreate the lists, excluding some categories? This would be feasible, I think, but I'd need a list of categories to exclude.
  5. Reference desk
    I haven't had much time to look at this yet, but I think we may want to start it as an entirely in-house thing to begin with, and then look at ways of pushing it elsewhere once we get it working.

Comments, criticism, suggestions, etc. would be very appreciated! Kirill 01:13, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

On the issue of an in house reference desk: If we can demonstrate that the idea will work here in a protected enviroment then we may have an easier time getting a real RD up and going on the WP:RD page. As for the Assessment Drive category suggestion: I think it a bad idea to exclude categoried, even if we only find one article that falls under our umbrella within those categorise then it is one more article we can add to our project. I think part of the problem is that we haven't really done this before, so their is a butload of work to be done, so if we make these a more regular occurance perhaps we can reduce the number of false hits we get. Just a thought. On an unrelated note I am having trouble with my home computer, so I am now having even more trouble getting here to help. Sorry if that incoviences anyone :/ TomStar81 (Talk) 02:07, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
I really question the worth of going through the 8,000-16,000 in the major false positives categories in order to seek out the odd untagged milhist article. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 13:07, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
While traveling the past three weeks since I didn't have my books with me to get any article writing done, I started plowing through the unassessed list in alphabetical order. It was a relatively painless task to undertake whenever the jet lag woke me up at 4 a.m. I think I've gotten about halfway through, to about the middle of the "M's". There's about 900 articles left to go. It takes about two minutes to assess each article, so if I can do 30 a day I should have the rest done in a about a month. Of course, anyone else is welcome to help out if willing or able. Cla68 12:57, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
That is a relatively painless task. However, the 165,000 articles for tagging here, isn't.--ROGER DAVIES TALK 13:07, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Ouch! I was planning on being mighty proud of myself after finishing with those 900 articles. 165k is tough mountain to climb. Cla68 13:18, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
You can still be proud for finishing 900 artilces. I'm proud that I have thought about thinking about getting started on working on another article to bring up to FA-class. Its all in the mind, and every little bit counts (: TomStar81 (Talk) 06:59, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Do you have any thoughts for making great inroads into the 150,000 articles in the Assessment Drive? I wish it could be done by wishful thinking too :) There was a fair amount of discussion of this a week or so back on this page, which you may have missed with your pooter problems. Basically, if we can get consensus for a broad strategy, and if no one else wants to handle it, I'm happy to coordinate the implementation. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 11:39, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
The problem here seems simply to be one of scale - small projects are easily handled in -house, but something this large is not only daunting, but really too much for the project to handle alone, given time constraints, interest level, etc. WP:BIO had virtually no problem getting thousands of articles assessed through an encyclopedia-wide appeal, coupled with awards. I believe the merits of this approach were debated at various points, but I can't remember if there were any truly compelling reasons not to try and accomplish this through the efforts of the broader community. Carom 16:40, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes. I've had a look around their pages and cannot see how they issued the Wiki-wide appeal. Any pointers on this please? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Roger Davies (talk • contribs) 09:09, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Well, if I recall correctly, the major advertisement was done through the community portal, specifically through a posting on Template:Announcements/Community bulletin board. There may also have been something in the Signpost, let me see... Carom 02:35, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

By the way User:Flubeca/monobook.js is showing up in the unassessed list as an unassessed article. I posted a notice about it on the admin's noticeboard but they apparently couldn't fix it. Is there a programmer's noticeboard that I should post this to, or would someone here know how to fix it? Cla68 08:07, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

This happens when you use outriggr's script - there's a fix, let me see if I can remember what it is... Carom 16:30, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
OK, the section ["{{WPMILHIST|class=}}" has to be replaced with ["{"+"{WPMILHIST|class=}}". I think that fixes the problem, although I have no idea why (this was figured out by somebody else, and I don't remember who, so I can't give proper credit). Carom 16:35, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Unfortunately, it's still showing. Cla68 02:16, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
That's because the monobook hasn't been changed - I didn't really think it appropriate to change someone else's...Carom 03:11, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I posted the issue at the help desk. Cla68 03:32, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
On this issue of an APB to Wikipedia for assessment aid: I think that would be the best idea to solve the problem; not that we can not handle the assessment drive, but the more help we get the faster the work will get done. IMO, Roger Davies, you should handle this as you see fit :) TomStar81 (Talk) 07:18, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
On a brief unrelated note: I glanced at the September newsletter and noticed SandyGeorgie's ciations for the chevron w/oak leaves. Would any one oppose noting in the letter that Sandy is the first non-project member to be awarded the chevrons? It seems like something we should note since the first time can, by its very nature, only happen once :) TomStar81 (Talk) 07:25, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Good idea; I've added a note to that effect. Kirill 12:28, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Some time ago I remember bring up the idea of having a category (or categories) to denote articles within the project and its associated task forces that drew information from documentary style tv and film series. I remember working on this idea for a while before shelving it due to real life interventions (like work), but I think perhaps it should be revisited if only to determine whether or not it would be a good idea to go ahead with it. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:59, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Hmm, I can see where categories for particular sources might be useful, but I'm not quite sure how simply knowing that an article had something sourced from a documentary would be of interest. Is there some context for such categories that I'm not aware of? Kirill 12:28, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
The context for this particular discussion came up after one (or more) people comment that some of our B, A, and FA-class articles were drawing information from documentary type shows and films, which led to a discussion of what the project considered acceptable sources for documentaries. There was, If I recall correctly, some conensus that documentaries should be used to cite information, the issue was over what type of documentaries would be acceptable to cite (like the differnce between citing information from Modern Marvels or the Military Channel vs citing information from Farinhieght 9/11 or something aong those lines) and how much wieght should be attached to such information (notably, in the case of A and FA class articles, whether citing to a documentary constituted citing a relianle source or whether the info should be backed up by other sources). One of the ideas thrown out was tagging articles including information from documetary-type shows with some kind of template or category so that people would know that information contained in the articles may have come from one or more documentary style shows and thus may have been subject to the given sides POV. It was on our main project talk page some time ago, and it seemed like a good idea at the time, but then like I noted it just sort of died without any consensus for or against. If I have a chance I will see if I can find the relevant discussion later and put a link to it here. TomStar81 (Talk) 20:25, 26 September 2007 (UTC)


Seems like an interesting idea. Two thoughts occur to me, though:
  • This may be better off on the talk page than the article itself; I think people will frown on "tag creep" to indicate something that's going to be largely informational.
  • It may be worthwhile to develop this into a more comprehensive means of tagging articles according to the types sources used rather than limiting it to just documentaries.
Kirill 02:06, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I found the original post (which was apparently made by me, although I wouldn't rule out outside infuence on my bringing it up) here; it would seem that the issue originally was incorrect information being reported in documentaries, with a one comment and no other contributers adding any input, so like I noted it sort of died. I think that you are right about this going on the talk page should we proceed with it, given that even the might DANFS tag got moved there by site consensus. I do think we should move foward with this idea, it will be a good way for us to pick out articles that may need double checking for accuracy and POV compliance. How we would go about such a thing is the issue here; we would either need to create a new categorization scheme to segragate articles incororating information from a ducumentary or we would have to come with a template tag for the talk page that can be tweaked to cover the different documentaries. This also sort of depends on how detailed we wish to be: noting that an article uses info from a ducemetary and noting that the article incorporates information from the History Channel program Modern Marvels, season x, show y, hosted by guy z, etc, can be the difference between knowing where the article's info comes from gerenal and where to go specifically to find out for sure. If other people show some interest in this idea then we can go ahead and sort out the finer details. TomStar81 (Talk) 06:52, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
  • I remember what it was now! It had to do with incorrect information on the air war over Korea during the Korean War which was reported in the show Dogfights. That was the original force behind the idea to tag articles with info from documentaries so as to track and correct and inaccurate info that may have gotten into one of our articles through main stream media scewups. This also banked the question how much info from documentary shows and films can be trusted, since a History channel program had incorrectly reported important elements of the battles they sought to recreat. This was further increased after I read the line "These episodes have been cited as a source for several Wikipedia articles, such as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.", and relised that we may be unintentionally citing incorrect info in articles, and if those articles go higher than B-class we run the risk of getting nailed for not checking the citations to ensure the info is correct. In a worse case scenario, an article that has correctly cited information, but the information itself is incorrect, could end up on the main page (and we would never here the end of it) :-( TomStar81 (Talk) 07:15, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
True, that. At this point, it's probably a good idea to take this discussion to WT:MILHIST and see what sort of tagging mechanism everyone would like to see implemented. My original thought was to work something directly into the {{MILHIST}} tag, but depending on what exactly we're doing, that might not be the best idea. Kirill 12:29, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Concur. TomStar81 (Talk) 19:39, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Moving forward?

I'm getting that "If I don't do something this is going to die again" feeling, therefore I ask if there are likely to be objections to this idea, and if there are no objections then perhaps we should proceed? I think in the long run this will be important to both our project and the encyclopedia as a whole, so I would hate to simply let this die again. TomStar81 (Talk) 07:27, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

I have no objections to it, but I'd like to work out an overall scheme for what we're trying to do before we start to implement bits and pieces of it.
I was thinking of using various tags in {{WPMILHIST}} to indicate a fairly broad range of sourcing options, similar to how some of the other checklists work. For example:
|uses-source-documentary=yes
|uses-source-website=yes
|uses-source-secondary-book=no
|uses-source-primary-book=yes
|uses-source-journal=yes
|uses-source-other=no
Tags for particular commonly-used sources (e.g. DANFS, EB1911, etc.) could perhaps be created as well. Is something like this (a) workable and (b) worthwhile? Or am I trying to over-engineer the system? Kirill 14:25, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I think its a good place to start, but perhaps we should include a tv and/or film tab(s) as well. I think the idea of working them right into the MILHIST template is a good idea, editors can see at a glance that these are tabs that can be filled out. My next question is whether the tabs should/will generate categories for the articles, or if thats even needed (I think it is, but I am one cog in the wheel). TomStar81 (Talk) 05:16, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Sudden thought: Why don't we put a note in the September newsletter about this? It may generate more input from other users and help us decide how to proceed. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:18, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
That's feasible, I suppose, but we'd need to pull the discussion back to the main project page, and may well wind up in the current position again two weeks down the road. It may be better to come up with a more coherent draft and present it. I've found that specific questions of the form "how about we do X?" tend to be better-received than more vague "what should we do?"-type ones; in the former case, at least, there's a starting point for discussion. Kirill 08:32, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Between the two of us, I'd say we have a working rough draft, and I have no objections about putting this back out on the main page if everyone gets notified of it. Since I missed my chance to have it mentioned in the September newsletter I would be willing to wait until the Ocotber one goes out and then revisit the idea and see if anyone else has input on the matter, assuming you don't mind having the MILHIST tab idea presented as solution and are willing to wait until the next new letter delivery. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:57, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Looks good to me; we can bring up the matter in a week or two and then discuss it in the newsletter at the same time. In the meantime, it would help to put together a list of other groups/pages/etc. (if any) that may be interested in what we'd be doing, so that we could inform them as well. Kirill 17:03, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Off the top of my head I would say that the Biography Wikiproject would be interested in this, many famous and notable people have biographs on the air and in print to celebrate their contribitions to society. I think they would probably be interested in the idea. I can not think of any other at the moment though. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:37, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps a better method of implamentation would be to reset the tabs to "|documentary x" where "x" is equal to a number from 1-9 and then use templates simalar to the ones currently used to generate the citations in the notes sections for our articles. This may allow more flexability (or complicate things more than they already are, I'm not sure which :) TomStar81 (Talk) 06:16, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Mmm, I'm not sure that would work, since those other templates weren't designed to be placed inside other templates. I can test it out, though. :-) Kirill 17:50, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
I got to thinking about what other groups may be interested in documentary categories here, aside from our group and its task forces I came up with law (specifically forensics) ships, astronomy, philosophy, and cold war as other potential wikipedia-wide projects and task forces that may be interested in this discussion. These groups were the ones I could come up with that have television programs or channels devoted to their particual interested (court tv, discovery channel, history channel, & learning channel) and thus may have a vested interest in keeping tabs on which articles in their perview incorporate info from documentaries. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:27, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
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