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Award ideas

File:Dummy awards.JPG
Initial thoughts and ideas
Vector graphic version

Here's an quick idea for "service" awards for the assessment drive. Say, the 1-chevron version for 250, 2-chevrons for 500, and 3-chevrons for a thousand. I've also knocked up a basic medal but I can't visualise how clasps would work for it or whether they'd work well reproduced small.

--ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:49, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Very nice work on the chevrons. I'm not quite sure whether it was intentional, but the slightly fuzzy patch-like look works well for them.
The medal isn't quite the right type for claps (which require a British-style long vertical ribbon rather than a Soviet-style wrapped bar); more generally, though, I think that basing our awards too closely on real-world ones is going to needlessly politicize them.
In any case, the design of the chevrons brings up an alternative to clasps, etc. for creating various more specific awards; we could replace the star design with an alternate image depending on what the award was for. But that's all a long-term thing; for the time being, I think we could use these designs for the assessment drive as they are. Kirill 17:28, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, Kyrill. Yes, it was intentional, to make them look stitched, but these are only dummies, I'll do it better in the final things (assuming there's consensus). And the roundels do indeed modify easily: anchors, crossed swords, propellers etc. I pretty much agree about the medal.--ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:06, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Sorry about the delay in doing this. The raid on my main machine (where Illustrator is) has been playing up, so I had to add a new drive before doing these. I've only got MSPaint on my laptop. It's less fuzzy than before but still looks badge-like I think. I lightened the badge background - perhaps too much? The graphic file is currently huge (137K), that needs fixing too. Otherwise, I've been checking out what WP:BIO did and will report back this evening. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 17:00, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
A bit too much on the stripes, I think; they look a little washed-out now. Maybe we could darken just that part of the image slightly? Kirill 17:02, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Absolutely. There's something not quite right here, the colours were much closer to the original at first. I'll check it out. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 17:06, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Some time passes ...

I've fixed (I think) the color problem (now darker and more vibrant) and the file-size problem (now a pocket-sized 4k).

  • One stripe
    One stripe
  • Two stripes
    Two stripes
  • Three stripes
    Three stripes

I'll post some other bit later (when I get back from the dentist)> --ROGER DAVIES TALK 14:25, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the colors look much better now. Unless someone has problems with this version, I think we can move forwards with it. Kirill 14:39, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Moving forward on the assessment drive

Trying to take stock of what we have so far:

  • Awards: Unless anyone has objections to Roger's design, we can presumably use the three chevrons as awards for the drive. (If so, they are on hold pending a final version of the image; but that shouldn't be too much of a stumbling block, I think.)
  • Lists: Do we want to redo the lists to exclude anything? People seem to have mixed opinions on it, and I frankly doubt we'll be able to eliminate very many false positives by any reasonably simple exclusion list; but if people want it done, I should be able to put something together for that.
  • Internal advertising: We're about to put out the September newsletter anyways; perhaps we should come up with a good blurb regarding the drive there?
  • External advertising: Assuming we want to follow the WPBIO route here, we need to come up with a plan for doing this; but we should probably have the infrastructure in place before we actually do this.

Comments? Kirill 01:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Comments, in order of your paragraphs
  1. I can have final versions of the chevron artwork done within, say, 48 hours.
  2. There are arguments for and against pruning the lists. I have no strong view either way.
  3. I'd prefer to defer internal advertising until the October newsletter, so we can present the assessment as a complete package. For maximum impact, we could precede this up with Eurocopter Tigre's individual call to action message, sent out a week or so earlier.
  4. I can write the blurbs / do the graphics for all this. Say, about a week.
  5. The external advertising needs to go out about the same time. We can also do specific promotions in WP:USA ("Milhist needs you" plus WWI Uncle Sam image, for example), WP:BIO, WP:SHIPS etc. This way a lot of their stuff gets tagged as well as ours.
New stuff
  1. I think we need a separate project page for this, say the Assessment Task Force.
  2. I think we should ask for a specific number of assessments, say 500, per editor. That's not too daunting. We'd need 350 or so editors to complete this.
  3. Awards should probably be geared to encouraging users to doing 1000. So, 1-chevron=500. 2-chevrons=750. 3-chevrons=1000
  4. We should consider giving a standard barnstar (not wikichevrons) AS WELL for 1000.
  5. The easiest way for us to monitor progress is for editors to adopt a range (say, 100,001-100,500) and add their names to a chart so they record their progress. (For ease of use, the ranges need wikilinking), along the lines of:
Range adopted Editor's name 250 done 500 done
100,001-100,500 User:Roger Davies  Doing...
100,501-101,000 User:Cla68  Done  Done
101,001-101,500 User:Kyriakos  Done  Done
101,501-102,000 User:Cla68  Done  Doing...
102,001-102,500 User:TomStar81  Done  Done
102,501-103,000 User:Eurocopter tigre  Done  Doing...
The actual tagging.
  1. Asking people unfamiliar with the subject to accurately assign specific task forces is probably a tall order. Let's concentrate at first on just slapping basic WP:MILHIST, WP:SHIPS, etc tags on. (Though if editors want to do add task forces they can.)
  2. Task force allocation can be a separate drive (but with a much smaller number of articles).
--ROGER DAVIES TALK 06:14, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that looks good. As far as having a separate page is concerned, we could probably repurpose the core assessment drive page for this, no? I'm somewhat wary of creating more pages unless we really need to, and this material shouldn't take up that much space. We just need to make it's linked to everywhere it needs to be. Kirill 14:24, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Makes sense. We'll need to put a gigantic wiki-linked chart of it. Can this be automated or would you like me to do it manually? I'll take the silence as consensus for the wiki-stripes (which I suppose proves that no one actually hates them) and get the artwork knocked out. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 13:53, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Chart (of a sort) done at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Drive#Worklists; please feel free to play around with the layout if it's not what you had in mind. Kirill 16:51, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
It's good. I've now blocked off the ones that have been done and added the totals to the tally list above it. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:49, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Advertisements

I've done some graphics for other projects' talk pages. Reactions? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:49, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Nice, very nice. Kirill 14:35, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Template stuff

I've add "Tag & Assess 2007" to the main MILHIST template for ease of navigation. (Tagging & Assessment Drive is awfully long-winded, chaps.) I deliberately did two to avoid tweaking all the background colours below. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:49, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Military biographies work group

I'd like to try and turn WPBIO's military work group into a joint task force with our project (presumably under the name of a "Military biography task force"). There haven't been any objections from WPBIO to the proposal, so it's probably feasible; but does anyone see any reason why doing this would be a bad idea? Kirill 14:33, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

Seems quite feasible, and perhaps not a bad idea. But this does seem to have an awfully large scope - after all, I wouldn't be surprised if something like 50% of all MilHist articles were biographies. I think that closer cooperation with WPBIO on format and style and all that could be great - coordinating some standards so that Milhist biographies share features with other biographies. Milhist bios of the major conflicts of the 20th century could certainly use for some help in this respect - figures who have a lot in common, such as WWII RAF pilots or American Marines of the Vietnam War, could certainly benefit from some standardization in the way Medal of Honor citations are rendered (for example), the way their division/regiment/whatever is listed, etc.
Still, I wonder how useful it is to have a single task force covering such an incredibly wide field of subjects - essentially all people in all of military history, from Leonidas to Alexander to William of Normandy to Genghis Khan, Oda Nobunaga, Admiral Nelson, Gen MacArthur and Ariel Sharon. ... LordAmeth 23:13, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
It's not, perhaps, the cleanest approach, and probably not one I would have pushed for; but, given that the group already exists, it seems best to bring it into the fold as much as possible. :-) Kirill 00:49, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I agree with that. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:44, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Less verbose text in tags

Is it technically feasible to have short forms as well as long forms for taskforce tagging? for example: UK=yes; US=yes; WWI=yes; WWII=yes; ACW=yes; Air=yes; Sea=yes; etc? It would save a lot of typing. In an ideal world, Y would work instead of yes too :) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 10:25, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

It's perfectly feasible (if somewhat time-consuming to implement), but there are some issues in terms of name selection. Using the "front" word in each parameter would be fine, since those are already guaranteed to be unique; thus:
  • British-task-force= → British=
  • WWII-task-force= → WWII=
  • Maritime-task-force= → Maritime=
And so forth. The problem with using word forms that don't appear in the parameter name already is that there's no good way to guarantee a one-to-one relationship between task forces and parameters, particularly in the long run. Suppose, for example, we get a "Military aircraft task force"; would "Air=" refer to Aviation or Aircraft?
(But this is just me grousing. If people really want even shorter forms, it could be done; I'd just need a list of alternate forms people want.) Kirill 14:41, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
Go with whatever short form you think best, Kirill :))) It will save a great deal of time in the loing run. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 06:54, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
Ok, will do when I get a bit of free time to go through the code. Kirill 12:14, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
This is finally done. I gave it some brief testing, and I don't think I broke anything; but testing "out in the field" would be very appreciated! Kirill 03:03, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

Status report for October 14

Trying to keep track of some outstanding matters:

Style guide
Since the RFCs seem to have produced no objections, I've left requests for comment at the Village Pump. I expect we'll see little input from there, but since the matter is now widely-advertised, we should be able to simply tag our style guide into the MoS after some time even if there's minimal outside participation.
Project consolidation
I'll be integrating WPBIO's military work group into our infrastructure fairly soon; that leaves us with basically the Arab-Israeli project (which I don't really want to touch yet) and the Castles project (and its descendant Scottish Castles) which seems to be entirely inactive now. Does anyone (LordAmeth?) have an opinion on what we should do with it? In particular, would turning it into a task force be workable, given their lack of response, and, if so, what should the scope of said task force be?
Assessment drive
Roger seems to have this well in hand now. :-) I assume we'll be officially launching at the start of November; it's mostly some paperwork (final versions of the awards, text for the newsletter & other announcements, etc.) that's still outstanding.
The tagged but unassessed list for the moment stands at zero. I wasn't the only on working on it so whoever else was I hope will come forward. Cla68 03:20, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Awards
There's currently a nomination for the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves that could use a bit more attention. Additional nominations would be welcome as well.
Subject-area contacts
Is there any further interest in keeping this running, in whatever form, or would people prefer that we mothball this?

As usual, comments on any of these points, or any other matters, are very welcome. Kirill 18:31, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

As far as the subject-area contacts are concerned, I don't know if there is a way to make them work in the way they were initially intended. While it's certainly a useful idea, it doesn't seem to have generated any interest from the broader project. Unless someone can think of a way to really make this work, I think it should be mothballed. Carom 20:13, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I've completed the integration of the biography work group here. It was a bit non-standard—the Bio project uses slightly different category names—so I'd appreciate it if someone could look it over and check that nothing is broken in a major way. Kirill 22:43, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I think the subject area contacts could be mothballed. On a similar but unrelated note, did anything ever happen to the military refernce desk idea? I thought that to be a suitable replacement for the contacts, but I haven;t heard anything about it for a while now. Also, I haven't been paying much attention to the assessment drive because of school, and now I see my name in there with a numerical range. Could someone explain what it is I am supposed to do with that range (and use small words please, school saps a lot of brains pout of me :) TomStar81 (Talk) 05:20, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
You mean a few sections up on this page? That's just a sample table; it doesn't mean anything. ;-) Kirill 12:53, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

New and great stuff. I am sorry that i was off for a couple of weeks. The Bio taskforce integration and tweaking was really needed. Congrats. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 14:20, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

(1) Wow. Just this morning the list of unassessed articles seemed far longer. And yet, now it's gone down to (as of my writing) 1 article. Very impressive. Thanks to all those who've been helping out.
(2) As for the castles project, did we not receive some resistance the last time we tried to dismantle the project and turn it into a task force? I think it could work better as a task force, especially if we were to incorporate other fortifications or military structures more widely into it. ... But if people over there consider the project to be active, and desire to remain separate (so as to incorporate castles that aren't really built for military purposes, and/or to remain closer connected to the Architecture project, or for various other reasons), then we have to respect that. Were there no responses the last time around?
(3) I'm sorry I haven't been particularly active lately - particularly on the Coordinator discussions, and on helping out with the massive tagging initiative. I haven't really had much free time for anything much lately; I've been checking my watchlist and attempting to stay in the loop, but I'm afraid I have not been doing much else. My sensei are pushing me really hard ^_^. Sorry! LordAmeth 07:25, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Re: (2): no, there's been no response at all; the project appears to be completely dead (at least as far as project-page traffic is concerned). So I think that turning it into a task force would be feasible at this point; the question is whether it would go straight to a Castles task force, or whether a more general Fortification task force would be more useful in the long run. (The second would be more difficult to get agreement for, were the project active; but if there's nobody around to object, it's somewhat of a moot point.) Kirill 04:51, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
For what it's worth, I'll vote for a fortifications task force over a castles task force so that it'll be more inclusive. Would military installations also fall into this task force? Cla68 07:00, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Not unless we made that the scope, I think; fortifications are a bit more specific a field than all military installations (e.g. office buildings, labs, etc.). I think a fortification task force would indeed be the better idea; I suppose the only drawback is that someone is more likely to complain.
(But if we're going to change the scope anyways, it may be easier to create a task force on our side first, and then consider the question of merging the project into it, rather than trying to merge and re-scope the project at the same time.) Kirill 18:34, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd also vote for a fortifications task force over a castles task force. But if the fortifications doesn't work out how about military structures. Kyriakos 21:07, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
I've posed the question to the project at WT:MILHIST#Fortification task force?; if we have enough interest, we can set one up and then go from there. Kirill 01:34, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
I've also left questions regarding possible mergers at Wikipedia:WikiProject Vikings (to Nordic military history) and Wikipedia:WikiProject Arab-Israeli conflict (to ME military history). No idea how they'll react, but we might as well pick up all the loose ends at this point. Kirill 01:40, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

Tag & Assess 2007

BACKGROUND -I've had a look at what WP:BIOGRAPHY did. Their drive appears to have reduced their backlog of unassessed articles by 50,000 over three months. Their reward scheme was as follows:

The WPBIOGRAPHY incentives
For assessing X articles, you will receive:
There will also be a "race" to see who can assess the most articles.
There will be special awards for the First, Second, and Third Place winners. These are:
  1. The Golden Wiki Award
  2. The Silver Wiki Award
  3. The Bronze Wiki Award

OUR VERSION - I suggest ours are closely modelled on this but capped at 4,000 because we don't have an equivalent to The Biography Barnstar. I'm hoping that the adopt-a-range idea will encourage people to do a minimum of 500. Graphically, ours looks like this:

  • 250 articles - One stripe
    250 articles - One stripe
  • 500 articles - Two stripes
    500 articles - Two stripes
  • 1000 - Three stripes
    1000 - Three stripes
  • 2000 articles - The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
    2000 articles - The Tireless Contributor Barnstar
  • 3000 articles - The Working Man's Barnstar
    3000 articles - The Working Man's Barnstar
  • 4000 articles - The Barnstar of Diligence
    4000 articles - The Barnstar of Diligence
  • Third place overall
    Third place overall
  • Second place overall
    Second place overall
  • First place overall
    First place overall

ROLL OUT - starting last week October

  1. Banner on Tag & Assess 2007 main page
  2. Invitations on talk pages of people who did best in the WPBIOGRAPHY drive (some did 5000 articles)
  3. Simultaneous invitations to all WPMILHIST memberships
  4. Ad in November MILHIST newsletter
  5. Ad in Template:Announcements/Community bulletin board
  6. Ad in Village Pump??
  7. Ads on talk pages of the following Wikiprojects: Ships, Aviation, Biography, USA. (see User:Roger Davies/Sandbox1 for examples]].

If this is okay, I'll write the ads and get the banner up on the Tag & Assess 2007 page. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 07:36, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

Looks good overall.
(We do have an equivalent to the Bio Barnstar, incidentally; that would be the WikiChevrons. But I'm not sure if we need a 5,000-article level in any case.) Kirill 12:16, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
(No, no. It's not an equivalent, it's better. :)))))) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 12:25, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
I like. I think it will work well. Kyriakos 08:01, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Looks good. Cla68 08:09, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

(outdent)I've posted the text and the awards banner on Tag & Assess 07 --ROGER DAVIES TALK 21:28, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Great work! Kirill 00:40, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally ...

The tagging drive doesn't say anything about task forces. We discussed earlier making this optional. However, I think we should bring task force allocation into the scheme by awarding Bronze Wikis to say the top ten people including a high proportion of them. If so, I'll need to work this into the instructions pop up. Thoughts? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 07:53, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

I am sorry but i am really confused. I tried to follow what's going on but i found it more confusing. Could you please explain to me what's going on in a line or two. Thanks in advance. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 11:37, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Yup. Kirill ran a script that generated a list of 160,000 articles from milhist-related categories. Some articles are already tagged milhist, some are milhist but not tagged; some are not milhist at all. They need manually sorting. The project is too big for milhist alone, so we're trying to recruit people to help. The Awards etc are to provide an incentive.
At the moment, we are just asking for tagging and assessing. My question is whether we want people to add task forces at the same time as they tag and assess. If so, do we reward them. Hope this helps. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 12:43, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Fantastic. Pretty clear. Ready for work. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 13:04, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

End-of-month plans

We have, if I recall correctly, two things that are going forward close to the end of the month:

Tag & Assess 2007
This is, if I understood what Roger had in mind, going to be widely publicized coincident with the October newsletter. We still need an actual announcement to put in the newsletter, but I think everything else is set up now.
Done below. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:10, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Source tagging
Unless anyone has objections, I'll propose the tagging-in-{{WPMILHIST}} model discussed above to the project in a few days; we'll also have an announcement for it in the newsletter.

Have I missed anything major here, or are we all pretty much on the same track? Kirill 18:29, 21 October 2007 (UTC)

I think that about covers it. TomStar81 (Talk) 00:03, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Looks good. Cla68 02:35, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Cool. We probably need the tags in two columns: the first the task force name, the second the tag. (Some of them aren't obvious.) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:10, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

I've started up the source tagging discussion at WT:MILHIST#Tagging articles according to sources used. If we don't get any serious objections in the near future, I'll go ahead and start adding the functionality to the template. Kirill 15:53, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Newsletter: Tag & Assess 2007 ad draft

Here's the draft. It's the bit between the horizontal rules. If we can go for a picture version, we don't need to do the separate mail out (700+ names!!!!) that Tigre suggested. If it doesn't fit into the newsletter format, perhaps it could be posted as a separate section at the same time as the newsletter goes out. (Killing two birds with one stone, huh?).

File:Romans MMVII.JPG

What's Tag & Assess MMVII? We'd better explain. A month or so back, we ran a script to list all the articles in categories related to military history. This gave us about 165,000 articles. Some of these are already tagged and assessed as military history; some are military history but not yet tagged and assessed; some are not military history articles at all. This huge project - working thorough 165,000 articles - is called Tag & Assess 2007. To make it manageable, the list has been broken down into 330 ranges each of 500 articles. This is where you can help.

Just... adopt-a-range from the available worklists then keep track of your tally on participants' list. The tagging is easy, just follow the simple instructions. Afterwards, as our way of thanking you, you'll be presented with service awards and barnstars based on the number of articles you process. Remember... the ranges are broken down into sub-sections of ten articles, so you work through them at twenty or thirty articles a day if you wish. To make Tag & Assess 2007 a success, we need your help. Please sign up now. Thanks.



Comments
  1. It would be nice if the gallery weren't so deep. I'd prefer less dead space top and bottom but I don't know how to do it (or if it can be done).
  2. I think we DO need a 5000+ articles award. Cromdog has done 1200 in a couple of days and we still have 80 days to go!

--ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:10, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

  • Putting the whole thing into the newsletter is quite doable; I'll set that up when I get a chance today. As for the 5,000+ article award, I agree with TomStar; the chevrons are a very obvious candidate. (We could, I suppose, go for the Epic Barnstar as well.) Kirill 12:46, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
That's a possibility. I was thinking of something along the lines of the Pour le Mérite. We can easily add bits to it then if someone goes and does, say, 10,000. :)) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:48, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
That's possible, but I'd recommend against using real-life awards. The odds of unintentionally offending someone with the Blue Max are admittedly lower than if we were using, say, the Ritterkreuz; but, still, I don't think the risk is worth it. Kirill 17:01, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
True enough though I was thinking of something very loosely based on it. The basic Maltese cross shape is used by loads of different countries. By the way, for 5000, were you thinking of WikiChevrons PLUS Epic Barnstar? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 17:07, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Either, actually; picking one would allow us to use the other one for a 10,000 award, incidentally. Kirill 17:09, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've added the ad to the newsletter: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter October 2007. Comments would be appreciated; mainly, does the format work? Kirill 00:58, 23 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, works well, I think. The only change might be to center the pictures though I'm looking at it on a 21" screen with the window full out so it's difficult to judge what it would look like on a smaller one. I'll be guided by you on that, Kirill :) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 01:31, 23 October 2007 (UTC)

A few semi-random thoughts

A few more-or-less unrelated ideas that have been floating around (some even outside my head ;-):

Mothballing
There don't seem to be any ideas for the contacts page other than mothballing it, so we can probably go ahead and do that in the near future. Aside from that, what do people think of mothballing the publication department? It was a good idea in theory, but I don't think there's any real interest in it within the project; and, since the external WikiReader idea seems to have gone nowhere over the past year, I think there's little point in keeping this open at the moment.
Publications is an ambitious idea, but it doesn't appear to have enough participation or support to go anywhere at the moment, mothballing would probably be a good idea. Cla68 02:38, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Concur. We can reactivate it when and if the need to arises. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:21, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Ok, will mothball both of them. Kirill 15:58, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
-- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 23:52, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Vital articles
FayssalF recently brought up the old collaboration on the main talk page, and the question of working on "vital articles" came up. Would it be feasible or worthwhile to organize something along these lines? There are a number of obvious approaches possible (come up with a single list and rotate through it, come up with a single list and work on all of it simultaneously, come up with short lists for each task force and rotate through them, etc.); but is it something worth spending time on overall?
I agree with the idea where we make a list and work on it simultaneously with an aim of getting these articles to A-class or FA. However, I suggest that if we indeed make a list of certain article that we choose non-controversial topics. Kyriakos 22:54, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
Can I get a link to the discussion? It sounds intersting, but I am not sure about the history here. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:21, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
WT:MILHIST#Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Collaboration. Kirill 16:10, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
It is perfectly reasonable to avoid controversial topics. The idea is to spend (exactly?) one week per article/task force. Disputed history/articles need sometimes months if not a lifetime to deal with and get it rated as As/FAs. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 23:52, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Old FAs
We still have about a dozen or so old FAs that are commented out in the showcase because of concerns over the citations (or lack thereof) in them. Would it be worthwhile organizing some sort of drive to run through them, improving them where possible and taking them to FAR otherwise? (They're going to wind up there anyways if nothing is done, I suspect; so we may as well do it in an organized fashion.)
I totally agree with this. I think that we should file through the old FAs that lack citations and references and if we can not improve them then we should put them up for FAR. Kyriakos 22:56, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
We could have a writing contest on this point to see who can update the greatest number of our hidden FAs, and give a first seconf and third place award to the top three contenders. In this manner we can clear our backlogged FA class articles while we run our assessment drive and finish both tasks at the same time. Just a thought. TomStar81 (Talk) 03:21, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, that could work. It'd probably be best to wait until a few other discussions (e.g. MOS, source tagging, etc.) wrap up, so as to avoid juggling too many things at once; but we could probably start this off in a few weeks. Kirill 16:10, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
For reference, a list of FAs in question:
  1. Battle of the Bulge
  2. Battle of Hampton Roads
  3. Battle of Inchon
  4. Battle of Jutland
  5. Blitzkrieg
  6. Chemical warfare
  7. Civil Air Patrol
  8. First Crusade
  9. Isaac Brock
  10. Kammerlader
  11. Karl Dönitz
  12. Polish-Muscovite War (1605–1618)
  13. Second Crusade
  14. Shrine of Remembrance
  15. Siege
  16. Stanisław Koniecpolski
  17. Swedish allotment system
  18. U.S. Navy Marine Mammal Program
  19. Virtuti Militari
  20. War of the Spanish Succession - I'll do this. I have lots of material on it. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 11:16, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
  21. William III of England
  22. William IV of the United Kingdom
  23. Witold Pilecki
Kirill 17:25, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Comments on any of these would be very appreciated! Kirill 02:27, 24 October 2007 (UTC)

If someone is working w/ Google Scholar, this is a very helpful tool designed specifically for tagging references and citations rapidly and w/o mistakes. I have no problem to start working on at least 2 of the articles above. The idea of a drive is interesting. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 23:52, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
If we proceed with the contest idea to clear these article out should we note on the parent FAs w/citation problems page that we are adressing the articles within our scope and ask that these articles be delayed from moving over to the FAR(C) page until we get things organized here? If this list shrinks much more we won't have enough to run a contest. Alternatively, we could include the articles already removed and see if we can not get some of the former featured articles back in the spot light. TomStar81 (Talk) 10:22, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

What's next?

What's next guys? Shall we move on? -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 12:19, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I think we can go with some manner of old FA reworking contest once the assessment drive has stabilized. That'll probably keep us busy until January-ish, at which point we could come back and deal with the vital articles matter, if we want to. Kirill 13:23, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Proposal for A-class and Peer Review awards

I noticed that the awards page now lists the three new sub-chevrons created by Roger Davies with the description "They are awarded to recognize contributions to specific project tasks and drives as may be announced from time to time." As such, I was wondering if there would be any interest in awarding the one and two chevron versions to editers who contribute to our articles that are listed under the Peer Review and A-class review sections. My hope here is that by regularly issueing these awards only under those circumstances we may encourage other contributers to become more involved with the process and thus cut down on the amount of "A-class review/Peer Review for (article) needs attention" messages on the main project page and task force pages. Note that this would not impede the abilty of the project to award these three service awards under assessment drive conditions. Comments on this idea, anyone? TomStar81 (Talk) 07:09, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

Good idea. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 09:32, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Yes, good idea. Would it be worthwhile to substitute a different image into the roundel for these, or should we just use the same one we have for the drive? Kirill 15:34, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Not a bad idea at all and I can easily design something ... though we'll all start looking like banana republic generals if we have too many. The big advantage of the wikistripes is that they incorporate a sort of barnstar. Incidentally, when is the October newsletter likely to go out? I was aiming to sync the announcements in other wikiprojects to it. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 16:39, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
It'll need a final update on October 1 (the contest results); after that, it's as soon as Grafikm runs the bot. Kirill 16:41, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Ok, it's done and in Grafikm's hands now; we can probably proceed with the external advertising as well. Kirill 00:54, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Good idea Tom. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 23:19, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
  • On the issue of redisgning the awards: I don't think we need to, by sheer coincidince A, PR, and FAC have one, two and three letters for denoting what they are, therefore we could numerically match the three new awards by Roger Davies with the three contributer input sections by the number of chevrons on the awards -- one for A-class, two for Peer Review, and three for FAC. That was my initial plan, anyway. Comments on it would also be welcome. TomStar81 (Talk) 21:15, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
    • That's true, but it also introduces a pretty bizarre ordering into the awards (which will be seen as ranking one-two-three stripes in seniority). It seems neater, to me, to have a separate set of three for all review work, with the differently-striped version awarded based on level of participation rather than type of review. Kirill 02:28, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Good point, Kirill. In that case I suppose a visual redesign is in order. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:17, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
If I understand this correctly, the proposal is for one, two and three stripe versions for each review level? ie nine new awards in total? Also are these for the reviewer or the reviewee? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 05:35, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Not as I understand it; from where I sit it would just eb a redesign of the existing 1,2, and 3 chevron assessment awards. That may not even be nessicary -- If we create clasps for A-class, Peer Review, and Featured Article Candidacy then we can keep the same awards and use the clasps to denote what action prompted an award. Again, just a thought. TomStar81 (Talk) 07:03, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Ah clasps again. How are we seeing these working? As part of a two-part award ie here's the standard stripe and here's a separate graphic of the clasp to go with it? --ROGER DAVIES TALK 11:03, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
There's a way to generate overlaid images that could be used to actually place the clasp on top of the normal award; I'll have to see if I can find the code that does it. Kirill 15:55, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
If this can be done it's an excellent solution and meets my objections.--ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:41, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
I was thinking of having only three new awards rather than nine; they'd be awarded interchangeably for participation in any review process. I don't really see the benefit of having different awards for each type of review. Kirill 15:55, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
Concur with Kirill. TomStar81 (Talk) 07:20, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Ditto. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 08:41, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
File:Wikistripes-dummy.JPG
Dummy stripes w/ jigsaw
Something like this? This is not the final thing by the way, just a quick dummy done in Paint. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 19:20, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Looks nice, although the puzzle piece is a somewhat unexpected choice for something like this (variations on the magnifying glass being a more common symbol for review processes). Kirill 00:48, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
But, bizarrely enough, it seems we have been pre-empted: WT:MILHIST#Template:ContentReviewMedal. ;-) Kirill 01:30, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Bizarrely but conveniently :) --ROGER DAVIES TALK 12:34, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Should we just adopt it for our own use, then, or do we want to continue developing a different award? Kirill 16:23, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Unless anyone strongly objects, adopt it, I'd say. It's very well designed and will be a commonly recognized standard. --ROGER DAVIES TALK 18:40, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
Concur. No need to expend energy on a new design if we already have an existing design. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:10, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

A-Class and GA

There seems to be one of the perennial attempts to reconcile A-Class and GA ratings going on at the moment; no idea where it'll go, since it's not clear what's being proposed except a merger.

This brings up some interesting points, however. The creation of the A-Class review was, in large part, motivated by the poor GA process at the time, and the lax requirements for an article getting GA status. Reading over some of the GA pages recently, I get the impression that things have shaped up considerably over there; in particular, WP:WIAGA now features citation requirements substantially identical to the ones at WP:MILMOS#CITE. Given the apparent change in circumstances, is an A-Class review process (and, by association, the A-Class rating itself) still worthwhile?

It would be possible, at this point, to collapse the scale down to FA-GA-B-Start-Stub, with both of the top classes done as an external evaluation. This would remove the need for dual reviews within the project (and the A-Class review seems to be taking on the verbosity of peer reviews recently) and allow us to concentrate our attention on a single peer review process. Given the current state of GAs, I don't think this would cause any significant reduction in quality; for the most part, articles that pass GA now are approximately at the same level as A-Class ones, albeit without the group review.

On the other hand, such a change would mean that we would no longer exercise any direct control over any rating above B-Class. Is this a significant loss? I would suspect that it's not going to be much of one in practice; the main goal for most things is FA, and we have peripheral control over that in any case.

Is this something worth considering? Kirill 01:17, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

I see two possible things we can do this: 1) Mothball the A-class review. By doing this we can maintian the department in a state of inactiveness as insurence against such a time as the GA-process loses credability again. This would ensure the ability to call back a higher rated review process in lew of GA-class if the GA-class process dulls again. 2) We could maintain the rank as a an alternative to GA-class for certain in house puropses (although admittedly I have no idea what that would be). Personally, I like the A-class review (and it was one of the reasons I suggested the assessment awards in the preceeding section). If we do choose to discontinue the A-class reviews I suggested coupling the current list of A-class articles to our list of FA-class articles needing improvement to clear out the A-class section on the parent project page; if the process ceases to exist, we should endovour to improve the A-class article we have to FA-status since that is considered higher than GA-class, and it would help prevent confusion over the presence of an A-class section but no A-class review. TomStar81 (Talk) 05:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I see no technical problems with retaining the ability to reactivate an A-Class review process once it's been deactivated, should we choose to do that; there's relatively little that would need to be reconstructed to get it up and running again.
As for the current A-Class articles, the neatest way of removing the A-Class rating from the scale while making allowance for them would probably be a two-step process:
  • Mass-nominate any that aren't GAs for GA status; the bulk of them ought to pass easily, allowing us to remove the rating from the scale without having them drop back into unassessed status.
  • Retain the current list of A-Class articles as the basis for FA efforts (contest-driven or otherwise). Eventually, the list should empty out.
Kirill 05:25, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Maintaining the A-class review allows us, much like over in WP:BIO, to maintain our own "pipeline" for facilitating the improvement and assessment of articles between B and FA nomination. Besides the past problems with inconsistent GA reviews was also the long time period that articles had to wait in the GA queue. With our A-class forum, we could "clear" an article as ready, or almost ready for FA nomination in four or five days, as opposed to the two weeks or more it might have to wait over in the GA forum. Also, our A class forum puts two or three sets of eyes on each article, as opposed to the GA forum which relies on a single reviewer to assess each article. When I was having trouble getting a particular article passed for FA, I eventually passed it through both the GA and A-class forums. With all of those different reviewers looking at it, by the time it made it back to the FA nomination queue it was ready to pass. I guess, though, that our peer review forum could accomplish the same results as our A-class forum. Cla68 08:17, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Yes, I was hoping that we could focus on using the peer review as the major way of getting a project-internal critique of an article; the lines between the two seem to have blurred a bit anyways.
The point about backlogs at GA is a good one, though. I wonder if we could help in this regard by giving the military history GA candidates more prominence; there's nothing preventing project members from doing the GA assessment, after all. It seems like it ought to be possible to transclude the list of relevant GA noms in our review department, just as we do for FACs, and that doing so would help with getting them processed faster; I'll have to look at the technical aspects a bit before I can give a definite answer on that, though. Kirill 12:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
I agree that A-class reviews are a good way for us to maintain a certain independence in the development of articles over B-class. I would perfer keeping it as I think that A-class is also a good steeping stone for people that hope to advance an article to FA class. I also agree with the problem caused by the sometimes massive backlog of article in WP:GAC, which from experience some times takes between 2 weeks and a month to be reviewed. But I like Kirill's idea of adding Military History GAC up on the review page so that they can receive more attention from the project. Kyriakos 20:24, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, it seems this backlog thing is going to be a show-stopper. I've experimented a bit, and it doesn't seem like my idea (conditionally including/noincluding page sections) actually works; so we're not going to be able to transclude anything off WP:GAN for our own use. And a multi-week backlog is rather too long for a primary pre-FAC review.
The other option, of course, would be to take the opposite tack and remove GA-Class rather than A-Class from the scale. This would essentially make the GA review a completely parallel external one, as far as the project was concerned; a GA could be assessed at any level by the project. This would simplify the relationship with the surrounding classes (at the moment, we have A-Class articles that failed a GA nom, and GA articles that fail the B-Class criteria). The only drawback would be that we'd no longer have a direct count of MILHIST GAs in our assessment statistics, but that doesn't seem like too big of a deal.
(For that matter, it may make sense to also get rid of Stub-Class, which would remove the remaining "discretionary" assessment level, and make everything basically dependent on some formalized assessment: Start → Check off B-Class criteria → B-Class → Go through A-Class review → A-Class → Go through FAC → FA-Class. But this might be too big of a change at this point.) Kirill 20:55, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Oh I review quite regularly at GAC and I am a bit of a rotten marker, but in any case, I think the culture at GA provides a different emphasis. I definitely think that MOS and formatting issues are enforced a lot more in GA, whereas with A-class, from my experience, the info comprehensiveness is the main thing. So I would say that it depends what you would be looking for. If someone considers themselves to be a good stylist, then probably skipping GA is a better option for their improvement needs. Whereas if a person has had style issues in FAC before, GAC feedback may be more useful [also it depends on the preferences of the reviewer]. Also, GA has the use of allowing "status" for short article due to obscurity of information. eg, Le Quang Tung would never make FA or A, but that's all that's in the uni library. Blnguyen (bananabucket) 03:33, 2 November 2007 (UTC)

We've had a number of rather short articles pass through A-Class reviews successfully; I see no reason that this one couldn't do the same. Kirill 03:46, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Correct, see the Fort Jackson (Virginia) article for example. --Eurocopter tigre 19:11, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Le Quang Tung is only half of Fort Jackson ....Blnguyen (bananabucket) 00:24, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
So it is; but Tent pegging is even shorter, and that's A-Class as well. Kirill 01:12, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, :) Blnguyen (bananabucket) 01:14, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Looking again at this page I don't think I was supposed to pipe up here.....Blnguyen (bananabucket) 05:05, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
Ah, we don't really mind. You did find it, after all. ;-) Kirill 05:06, 16 November 2007 (UTC)
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