This Military history WikiProject page is an archive, log collection, or currently inactive page; it is kept primarily for historical interest. |
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 |
Happy New Year, all. I hope that 2008 will be as succsessfull for us as 2007 was. It is my hope that this message finds you all in good spirits. On that note, I have question: to best meet the new year, do we have any old business that needs to be immediately adressed? Best to handle it now so we can focus on 2008. ^_^ TomStar81 ( Talk) 07:48, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
The newsletter is basically done (minus the contest results) at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter December 2007. Someone checking it over to see if I've missed anything would be appreciated. Kirill 19:53, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
Is there a set time for the work shop to remain open? I see no closure date, hence the question. TomStar81 ( Talk) 23:18, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Would it be feasable to get one of the bots here to archove the task force talk pages? they seem to end up with a large number posts that in most cases are old news or adressed issues. TomStar81 ( Talk) 00:20, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
WWI, Russian, German, French, Canadian, Australian, Milaviation, Polish and Chinese task forces are archived, but I didn't manage to do the WWII one. Can somebody with some experience in archiving have a look on it? -- Eurocopter tigre ( talk) 22:43, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Since the next election is going to take place at the end of the month, now might be a good time to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding any changes (or lack thereof) to the procedure.
Comments would be appreciated! Kirill 16:37, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
Respectively:
I have no objections to the 1st point, and I would also preffer the current Lead/Assistant scheme. -- Eurocopter tigre ( talk) 21:25, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I have no problems with the first point and I think we should keep the Lead/Assistant scheme. Kyriakos ( talk) 22:40, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
No problems with either suggestion. It might be an idea to explicitly have the two or three top-failing candidates as standby replacements if, as - for instance - in the case of Carom, any of the elected candidates are unable to serve. It might also be an idea, in the case of a tie for the last position, to take both candidates. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 22:58, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I've set up the next election page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/February 2008. Assuming no last-minute changes, the signup period will open on February 1; are we going to distribute a note to all active members at that point (as we did last time), or do we only want to send one out when the voting begins on February 15? Kirill 00:42, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) How many coordinators this time round? I'd support Fayssal's proposal of twelve but can live with nine. What do others think? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 10:20, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Since we're planning to distribute a note when the sign-up starts (this evening!), here's the text we used last time:
Assistance with sending this out when the time comes will be greatly appreciated, of course! :-) Kirill 13:33, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
The sign-ups are now open, so if anyone has some time to help with sending the note out, that'd be great! :-) Kirill 00:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
I had a chance to comment on both MBK004's rfa and BQZip01's rfa; on the rfa talk page are several comments left following BQZip01's canvassing event. Since canvassing is frowned upon I wonder if we might set up some kind of in house methode of alerting our contributers to rfa candidates who edit for us. Admittedly this suggested is a little outside the responsibility coordinators here are charged with, but it may be worth at least getting some input for to help spread the word in a neutral manner. Thoughts? —Preceding unsigned comment added by TomStar81 ( talk • contribs) 08:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
ought to be defensible from a canvassing standpoint.A member of the project, User:X, is currently a candidate to receive access to administrative tools. Other project members who have worked with him and have an opinion of the candidate's fitness to receive these tools are cordially invited to comment.
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/Toolbox/Administrator candidacy notice|MBK004}} ~~~~
as the content. It's basically identical to the way the existing review notices are set up.
Kirill
04:53, 21 January 2008 (UTC)The new improved peer review pages have transcluded lists from other WikiProjects. Can our active peer review list be included there too? Is there a central list anywhere? It's a great outreach thing.... -- ROGER DAVIES talk 05:43, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
There's apparently a bit of confusion regarding what our role (or lack thereof) is with regards to article disputes (probably due to the last sentence in the "Responsibilities" section). I'd like to add some text to clarify this; the additions are in bold below.
In the "Current coordinators" section:
The project coordinators are generally responsible for maintaining all of the procedural and administrative aspects of the project, and serve as the designated points-of-contact for procedural issues. They are not, however, endowed with any special executive powers, or with any authority over article content or editor conduct.
In the "Responsibilities" section:
The coordinators also have several additional roles. They serve as the project's designated points of contact, and are explicitly listed as people to whom questions can be directed in a variety of places around the project. In addition, they have highly informal roles in leading the drafting of project guidelines, overseeing the implementation of project decisions on issues like category schemes and template use, and helping to informally resolve disputes and keep discussions from becoming heated and unproductive. The coordinators are not, however, a body for formal dispute resolution; serious disputes should be addressed through the normal dispute resolution process.
Any problems with the wording here? Kirill 02:42, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Just a note for anyone that hasn't yet seen it yet that Bedford's nomination for the WikiChevrons with Oakleaves has been sitting here for five days with no additional comments. If some other coordinators could drop by, that would be great. Thanks! -- ROGER DAVIES talk 08:17, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Ok, I have dropped by the page. Kyriakos ( talk) 10:29, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Would it be at all possible for us to send out a notice to all project members with the next news letter asking them to check and see that their names are listed in the right sections? I had five or six people registered for the project but officially gone either by choice or by ruling of the arbitration committee, and it would be nice to know how many folks are still with us at the start of 2008. Other projects have done this by sending out a "roll call" template. Thoughts? TomStar81 ( Talk) 10:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Do we still procede with the election if we only get nine candidates? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 15:43, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Now that voting in the coordinator election has begun, we'll presumably want to send out the second message to members:
Assistance would be appreciated! Kirill 02:10, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Now that the assessment drive is winding down, I think we're ready to consider what, if anything, we want to focus attention on next. The assessment drive was, in my opinion, a massive success—much thanks to Roger for all the work he did running it!—and we should try to follow up on it.
(I've made a request for assistance with the infobox conversion list yesterday, but that's not really suitable for a major undertaking, I think [and, hopefully, will be finished in fairly short order].)
There are, I think, two broad paths we can pursue:
Development:
Article work:
Of the two, I would suggest that we should probably emphasize the latter. Trying to accomplish something practical on guideline development or category restructuring is typically very time-consuming and pretty boring for anyone not into the minutiae of the topic of debate, and tends to require multiple abortive attempts before something coalesces. It may be a better approach to focus attention on practical article-writing matters—particularly as far as exposure outside the project is concerned—and leave the more abstruse issues as a sideshow. Article-writing tasks also lend themselves fairly well to contests and award schemes of the sort used during the assessment drive, and I think participation in them would be higher as a result.
Thoughts? Kirill 04:04, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Having done some more thinking about how to actually attract people to these core articles, how about this:
The specifics of the contest (e.g. awards, eligibility thresholds, etc.) would obviously need to be worked out; but is the general idea something that seems feasible (and worth doing)? Kirill 04:53, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
A first attempt at putting together an article list:
General articles:
Task force articles:
The total of 60 articles ought to be enough for people to be able to find something they'd like to work on. Some of the task force ones don't exist at the moment, though; I'm not sure if it would be better to just allow the redlinks, or to pick secondary articles as replacements.
Comments? Kirill 03:02, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
So, assuming we want to pursue this idea, how should we arrange this contest? If we ignore the really low-level stuff, we basically have four progress levels: B-Class, GA, A-Class, and FA; can we set up a simple award scheme, with everyone participating getting awards based on the final class of the article (provided it's above the starting class)? In other words, an article starting as a stub would be eligible for four awards, and article starting at B-Class for three, a GA for two, and so forth.
Also, do we want to develop new images for this, or just use standard awards and/or the service stripes developed for the assessment drive?
(It would be beneficial, I think, to try and launch the contest sometime during the election period; a lot of people will be brought out of hiding by the notices they get and are likely to be browsing the project pages looking for things to do.) Kirill 03:09, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I've been looking at the line-up of articles and I think they present a few problems. First, generic articles like this are not very exciting to write (and I think take a special kind of editor). Second, absent a specialist book on the subject, there's a major problem with sources, especially English-language ones. Third, the easiest ones (from a sourcing point of view) are already FA.
This prompted me to employ state-of-the-art Wiki-technology, ( Henrik's's brand new en.wikipedia.org article traffic statistics program), on a pretty-randomly selection of articles. It produced some interesting results:
Article name | Traffic | Class |
---|---|---|
Military history of Australia | 1,467 | B |
: Battle of Gallipoli | 49,381 | Start |
Military history of Canada | 8,257 | FA |
: Battle of Vimy Ridge | 17,798 | B |
Military history of France | 7,531 | FA |
: Battle of Verdun | 26,427 | B |
: Napoleon I of France | 199,376 | ex-FA |
Military history of the United Kingdom | 2,729 | Start |
: Battle of the Somme | 17,573 | exFA |
: Battle of Waterloo | 74,023 | GA |
: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson | 25,979 | exFA |
: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington | 30,569 | exFA |
Military history of the United States | 12,324 | B |
: George Washington | 273,449 | FAC |
: Robert E. Lee | 113,835 | B |
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that "Military history of Foo" articles are nothing like as visited (popular) as battles or biographies and suggests that we might be misusing resources by expanding great effort on them. Two other points occured to me.
I think our efforts should go into restoring exFA to FA and working popular battles and biographies up to FA.
If we go down this route, we can group candidate articles by task force, getting input from the appropriate TFs to create the list. The idea would be that the candidate articles deal with iconic personalities and iconic events in the history of the TF. We can then seek invite appropriate Wikiprojects to cooperate with specific TFs for the content work. This has two advantages:
The next suggestion is rather radical. I think that developing the "Military history of Foo" articles should be the responsibility of the appropriate TF, perhaps with coordinators attached semi-formally to them to ease the process along.
Finally, whatever we do we should not call it Core Article Competition, because the acronym - which is bound to get used - is unfortunate :)
These are just initial ideas, thoughts anyone?
-- ROGER DAVIES talk 16:52, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there any simple way of transcluding Milhist PR, A-Class, and FAC lists of relevance to WP:SHIPS automatically? that is, we add them here and in they have the WP:SHIPS template they appear there too? Is seems a bit more professional than waiting for people to spot them and I was wondering if this was easy to implement. This is mostly for Kirill, I suspect. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 11:28, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
This has been raised several times in the last couple of months and has suddenly become pertinant again. With Kirill retiring, does the project actually need a lead coordinator? I'm thinking that much of what he did to hold the project together (templates, updates, advice, MOS etc) isn't actually part of the lead's job description. Having looked at the very high quality and extraordinary experience of the candidates, I think it's doing the project a disservice to have a leader and eight subordinates. I'd rather see nine coordinators, moving forward based on consensus, and prefer the idea for devolving power/influence rather than centralising it. I'll post this also on the Election talk page-- ROGER DAVIES talk 07:35, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Unless there are any objections, I would like to add the following to the bottom of the coordinator election page ASAP:
== Lead Coordinator Referandum == Recently, much discussion has taken place within the Military History Project regarding our coordinator scheme, which presently uses a lead/assisstant setup. After much discussion between the coordinators and other members of the project over the continued use of lead/assistant scheme vs an equal scheme or a president/cabinent scheme, we have decided to place the issue before the community and determine what our contributers would like to see. Your input on the following proposals is therefore requested:
Any objections? TomStar81 ( Talk) 02:07, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
I would like to make two suggestions:
Comments on these suggestions? TomStar81 ( Talk) 08:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
It sounds like there are no objections in principle to the 1st suggestion regarding the nomination of standing coordinators for the Chevron w/Oak Leaves provided that we do not award the Oak Leaves version until after a standing coordinator either steps down/resigns or is removed from office. Am I correct in this assumption? TomStar81 ( Talk) 00:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Any more support for this? Any objections? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 13:13, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Back in October this page was involved in an MfD debate because it was thought by one user to be unnessicary. The contributer responsible for the nom, Melsaran ( talk · contribs), has since been blocked as a sock puppet. To me, thats funny :-) TomStar81 ( Talk) 18:10, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Just saw this: WT:WikiProject_Military_history/Review#Image:Symbol a class.svg and think it is a good idea, but is posted in a place that gets very little activity. Perhaps the new coordinators would like something easy to start with? - MBK 004 00:26, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Then, I say go for it. Since you know how to do it, and there seems to be a rough consensus to implement. - MBK 004 17:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Welcome to all coordinators, new and returning. It will be a pleasure to serve with each of you for the next six monthes. As this election is now formally concluded we have settled on the nine users who will be coordinators, and we have also concluded the referendum on the format for the coridnators: the projects members who comments there overwhelmingly seem to favor the maintence of the lead/assistant scheme. Is there anything else that needs to be addressed immediately? Any objects, concerns, compliants suggestions, anything of that nature? TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
I briefly mentioned this in my answers to a Q during the elections. I was thinking of creating a list on the Project pages of a list of users who have access for Electronic journals (uni people) so that they can obtain copies of academic papers and email them to users who are not at a uni and can't access them. You can get quite a lot of more obscure and specialised stuff from journals that you can't get elsewhere, and some of my A-class articles ( Yen Bai mutiny, Truong Dinh) were possible only because I trawled through the journals at my uni and downloaded anything on Vietnam that I could get my hands on. What do people think? Blnguyen ( vote in the photo straw poll) 08:25, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Just wondering are journal catalogues usually browsable for people who do not have subscriptions. I don't know since I am subscribed through university if a person from the outside can see an article by article list of the journals. If an article by article list exists, people without access can just do a brute force sweep of the titles for random things from the country/general topic that they looking for without following a ref from another source. Else, we might have to type up our own list of all the articles....... Blnguyen ( vote in the photo straw poll) 06:38, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
{Outdent} JSTOR added to the Logistics Dept 'here. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 12:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
I'll start fleshing out the page this weekend. Probably best if we keep it off the main template until it's populated a little. In the meantime, does anyone object if it takes the "Stress hotline" slot? the hotline gets so little traffic ... -- ROGER DAVIES talk 09:52, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
This is taking shape and editors are voluntering satisfactorily. We're a bit light on language skills so any contributions would be very welcome. Any ideas on other areas the logistics dept could tackle? Any comments or crirticims on it generally? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 22:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
This Military history WikiProject page is an archive, log collection, or currently inactive page; it is kept primarily for historical interest. |
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | ← | Archive 5 | Archive 6 | Archive 7 | Archive 8 | Archive 9 | Archive 10 |
Happy New Year, all. I hope that 2008 will be as succsessfull for us as 2007 was. It is my hope that this message finds you all in good spirits. On that note, I have question: to best meet the new year, do we have any old business that needs to be immediately adressed? Best to handle it now so we can focus on 2008. ^_^ TomStar81 ( Talk) 07:48, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
The newsletter is basically done (minus the contest results) at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter December 2007. Someone checking it over to see if I've missed anything would be appreciated. Kirill 19:53, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
Is there a set time for the work shop to remain open? I see no closure date, hence the question. TomStar81 ( Talk) 23:18, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Would it be feasable to get one of the bots here to archove the task force talk pages? they seem to end up with a large number posts that in most cases are old news or adressed issues. TomStar81 ( Talk) 00:20, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
WWI, Russian, German, French, Canadian, Australian, Milaviation, Polish and Chinese task forces are archived, but I didn't manage to do the WWII one. Can somebody with some experience in archiving have a look on it? -- Eurocopter tigre ( talk) 22:43, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Since the next election is going to take place at the end of the month, now might be a good time to make sure everyone is on the same page regarding any changes (or lack thereof) to the procedure.
Comments would be appreciated! Kirill 16:37, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
Respectively:
I have no objections to the 1st point, and I would also preffer the current Lead/Assistant scheme. -- Eurocopter tigre ( talk) 21:25, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I have no problems with the first point and I think we should keep the Lead/Assistant scheme. Kyriakos ( talk) 22:40, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
No problems with either suggestion. It might be an idea to explicitly have the two or three top-failing candidates as standby replacements if, as - for instance - in the case of Carom, any of the elected candidates are unable to serve. It might also be an idea, in the case of a tie for the last position, to take both candidates. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 22:58, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
I've set up the next election page at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/February 2008. Assuming no last-minute changes, the signup period will open on February 1; are we going to distribute a note to all active members at that point (as we did last time), or do we only want to send one out when the voting begins on February 15? Kirill 00:42, 27 January 2008 (UTC)
(outdent) How many coordinators this time round? I'd support Fayssal's proposal of twelve but can live with nine. What do others think? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 10:20, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
Since we're planning to distribute a note when the sign-up starts (this evening!), here's the text we used last time:
Assistance with sending this out when the time comes will be greatly appreciated, of course! :-) Kirill 13:33, 31 January 2008 (UTC)
The sign-ups are now open, so if anyone has some time to help with sending the note out, that'd be great! :-) Kirill 00:02, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
I had a chance to comment on both MBK004's rfa and BQZip01's rfa; on the rfa talk page are several comments left following BQZip01's canvassing event. Since canvassing is frowned upon I wonder if we might set up some kind of in house methode of alerting our contributers to rfa candidates who edit for us. Admittedly this suggested is a little outside the responsibility coordinators here are charged with, but it may be worth at least getting some input for to help spread the word in a neutral manner. Thoughts? —Preceding unsigned comment added by TomStar81 ( talk • contribs) 08:18, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
ought to be defensible from a canvassing standpoint.A member of the project, User:X, is currently a candidate to receive access to administrative tools. Other project members who have worked with him and have an opinion of the candidate's fitness to receive these tools are cordially invited to comment.
{{Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/Toolbox/Administrator candidacy notice|MBK004}} ~~~~
as the content. It's basically identical to the way the existing review notices are set up.
Kirill
04:53, 21 January 2008 (UTC)The new improved peer review pages have transcluded lists from other WikiProjects. Can our active peer review list be included there too? Is there a central list anywhere? It's a great outreach thing.... -- ROGER DAVIES talk 05:43, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
There's apparently a bit of confusion regarding what our role (or lack thereof) is with regards to article disputes (probably due to the last sentence in the "Responsibilities" section). I'd like to add some text to clarify this; the additions are in bold below.
In the "Current coordinators" section:
The project coordinators are generally responsible for maintaining all of the procedural and administrative aspects of the project, and serve as the designated points-of-contact for procedural issues. They are not, however, endowed with any special executive powers, or with any authority over article content or editor conduct.
In the "Responsibilities" section:
The coordinators also have several additional roles. They serve as the project's designated points of contact, and are explicitly listed as people to whom questions can be directed in a variety of places around the project. In addition, they have highly informal roles in leading the drafting of project guidelines, overseeing the implementation of project decisions on issues like category schemes and template use, and helping to informally resolve disputes and keep discussions from becoming heated and unproductive. The coordinators are not, however, a body for formal dispute resolution; serious disputes should be addressed through the normal dispute resolution process.
Any problems with the wording here? Kirill 02:42, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Just a note for anyone that hasn't yet seen it yet that Bedford's nomination for the WikiChevrons with Oakleaves has been sitting here for five days with no additional comments. If some other coordinators could drop by, that would be great. Thanks! -- ROGER DAVIES talk 08:17, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Ok, I have dropped by the page. Kyriakos ( talk) 10:29, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
Would it be at all possible for us to send out a notice to all project members with the next news letter asking them to check and see that their names are listed in the right sections? I had five or six people registered for the project but officially gone either by choice or by ruling of the arbitration committee, and it would be nice to know how many folks are still with us at the start of 2008. Other projects have done this by sending out a "roll call" template. Thoughts? TomStar81 ( Talk) 10:12, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
Do we still procede with the election if we only get nine candidates? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 15:43, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Now that voting in the coordinator election has begun, we'll presumably want to send out the second message to members:
Assistance would be appreciated! Kirill 02:10, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Now that the assessment drive is winding down, I think we're ready to consider what, if anything, we want to focus attention on next. The assessment drive was, in my opinion, a massive success—much thanks to Roger for all the work he did running it!—and we should try to follow up on it.
(I've made a request for assistance with the infobox conversion list yesterday, but that's not really suitable for a major undertaking, I think [and, hopefully, will be finished in fairly short order].)
There are, I think, two broad paths we can pursue:
Development:
Article work:
Of the two, I would suggest that we should probably emphasize the latter. Trying to accomplish something practical on guideline development or category restructuring is typically very time-consuming and pretty boring for anyone not into the minutiae of the topic of debate, and tends to require multiple abortive attempts before something coalesces. It may be a better approach to focus attention on practical article-writing matters—particularly as far as exposure outside the project is concerned—and leave the more abstruse issues as a sideshow. Article-writing tasks also lend themselves fairly well to contests and award schemes of the sort used during the assessment drive, and I think participation in them would be higher as a result.
Thoughts? Kirill 04:04, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Having done some more thinking about how to actually attract people to these core articles, how about this:
The specifics of the contest (e.g. awards, eligibility thresholds, etc.) would obviously need to be worked out; but is the general idea something that seems feasible (and worth doing)? Kirill 04:53, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
A first attempt at putting together an article list:
General articles:
Task force articles:
The total of 60 articles ought to be enough for people to be able to find something they'd like to work on. Some of the task force ones don't exist at the moment, though; I'm not sure if it would be better to just allow the redlinks, or to pick secondary articles as replacements.
Comments? Kirill 03:02, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
So, assuming we want to pursue this idea, how should we arrange this contest? If we ignore the really low-level stuff, we basically have four progress levels: B-Class, GA, A-Class, and FA; can we set up a simple award scheme, with everyone participating getting awards based on the final class of the article (provided it's above the starting class)? In other words, an article starting as a stub would be eligible for four awards, and article starting at B-Class for three, a GA for two, and so forth.
Also, do we want to develop new images for this, or just use standard awards and/or the service stripes developed for the assessment drive?
(It would be beneficial, I think, to try and launch the contest sometime during the election period; a lot of people will be brought out of hiding by the notices they get and are likely to be browsing the project pages looking for things to do.) Kirill 03:09, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I've been looking at the line-up of articles and I think they present a few problems. First, generic articles like this are not very exciting to write (and I think take a special kind of editor). Second, absent a specialist book on the subject, there's a major problem with sources, especially English-language ones. Third, the easiest ones (from a sourcing point of view) are already FA.
This prompted me to employ state-of-the-art Wiki-technology, ( Henrik's's brand new en.wikipedia.org article traffic statistics program), on a pretty-randomly selection of articles. It produced some interesting results:
Article name | Traffic | Class |
---|---|---|
Military history of Australia | 1,467 | B |
: Battle of Gallipoli | 49,381 | Start |
Military history of Canada | 8,257 | FA |
: Battle of Vimy Ridge | 17,798 | B |
Military history of France | 7,531 | FA |
: Battle of Verdun | 26,427 | B |
: Napoleon I of France | 199,376 | ex-FA |
Military history of the United Kingdom | 2,729 | Start |
: Battle of the Somme | 17,573 | exFA |
: Battle of Waterloo | 74,023 | GA |
: Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson | 25,979 | exFA |
: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington | 30,569 | exFA |
Military history of the United States | 12,324 | B |
: George Washington | 273,449 | FAC |
: Robert E. Lee | 113,835 | B |
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that "Military history of Foo" articles are nothing like as visited (popular) as battles or biographies and suggests that we might be misusing resources by expanding great effort on them. Two other points occured to me.
I think our efforts should go into restoring exFA to FA and working popular battles and biographies up to FA.
If we go down this route, we can group candidate articles by task force, getting input from the appropriate TFs to create the list. The idea would be that the candidate articles deal with iconic personalities and iconic events in the history of the TF. We can then seek invite appropriate Wikiprojects to cooperate with specific TFs for the content work. This has two advantages:
The next suggestion is rather radical. I think that developing the "Military history of Foo" articles should be the responsibility of the appropriate TF, perhaps with coordinators attached semi-formally to them to ease the process along.
Finally, whatever we do we should not call it Core Article Competition, because the acronym - which is bound to get used - is unfortunate :)
These are just initial ideas, thoughts anyone?
-- ROGER DAVIES talk 16:52, 2 February 2008 (UTC)
Is there any simple way of transcluding Milhist PR, A-Class, and FAC lists of relevance to WP:SHIPS automatically? that is, we add them here and in they have the WP:SHIPS template they appear there too? Is seems a bit more professional than waiting for people to spot them and I was wondering if this was easy to implement. This is mostly for Kirill, I suspect. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 11:28, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
This has been raised several times in the last couple of months and has suddenly become pertinant again. With Kirill retiring, does the project actually need a lead coordinator? I'm thinking that much of what he did to hold the project together (templates, updates, advice, MOS etc) isn't actually part of the lead's job description. Having looked at the very high quality and extraordinary experience of the candidates, I think it's doing the project a disservice to have a leader and eight subordinates. I'd rather see nine coordinators, moving forward based on consensus, and prefer the idea for devolving power/influence rather than centralising it. I'll post this also on the Election talk page-- ROGER DAVIES talk 07:35, 13 February 2008 (UTC)
Unless there are any objections, I would like to add the following to the bottom of the coordinator election page ASAP:
== Lead Coordinator Referandum == Recently, much discussion has taken place within the Military History Project regarding our coordinator scheme, which presently uses a lead/assisstant setup. After much discussion between the coordinators and other members of the project over the continued use of lead/assistant scheme vs an equal scheme or a president/cabinent scheme, we have decided to place the issue before the community and determine what our contributers would like to see. Your input on the following proposals is therefore requested:
Any objections? TomStar81 ( Talk) 02:07, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
I would like to make two suggestions:
Comments on these suggestions? TomStar81 ( Talk) 08:08, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
It sounds like there are no objections in principle to the 1st suggestion regarding the nomination of standing coordinators for the Chevron w/Oak Leaves provided that we do not award the Oak Leaves version until after a standing coordinator either steps down/resigns or is removed from office. Am I correct in this assumption? TomStar81 ( Talk) 00:45, 23 February 2008 (UTC)
Any more support for this? Any objections? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 13:13, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Back in October this page was involved in an MfD debate because it was thought by one user to be unnessicary. The contributer responsible for the nom, Melsaran ( talk · contribs), has since been blocked as a sock puppet. To me, thats funny :-) TomStar81 ( Talk) 18:10, 27 February 2008 (UTC)
Just saw this: WT:WikiProject_Military_history/Review#Image:Symbol a class.svg and think it is a good idea, but is posted in a place that gets very little activity. Perhaps the new coordinators would like something easy to start with? - MBK 004 00:26, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Then, I say go for it. Since you know how to do it, and there seems to be a rough consensus to implement. - MBK 004 17:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
Welcome to all coordinators, new and returning. It will be a pleasure to serve with each of you for the next six monthes. As this election is now formally concluded we have settled on the nine users who will be coordinators, and we have also concluded the referendum on the format for the coridnators: the projects members who comments there overwhelmingly seem to favor the maintence of the lead/assistant scheme. Is there anything else that needs to be addressed immediately? Any objects, concerns, compliants suggestions, anything of that nature? TomStar81 ( Talk) 01:09, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
I briefly mentioned this in my answers to a Q during the elections. I was thinking of creating a list on the Project pages of a list of users who have access for Electronic journals (uni people) so that they can obtain copies of academic papers and email them to users who are not at a uni and can't access them. You can get quite a lot of more obscure and specialised stuff from journals that you can't get elsewhere, and some of my A-class articles ( Yen Bai mutiny, Truong Dinh) were possible only because I trawled through the journals at my uni and downloaded anything on Vietnam that I could get my hands on. What do people think? Blnguyen ( vote in the photo straw poll) 08:25, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
Just wondering are journal catalogues usually browsable for people who do not have subscriptions. I don't know since I am subscribed through university if a person from the outside can see an article by article list of the journals. If an article by article list exists, people without access can just do a brute force sweep of the titles for random things from the country/general topic that they looking for without following a ref from another source. Else, we might have to type up our own list of all the articles....... Blnguyen ( vote in the photo straw poll) 06:38, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
{Outdent} JSTOR added to the Logistics Dept 'here. -- ROGER DAVIES talk 12:55, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
I'll start fleshing out the page this weekend. Probably best if we keep it off the main template until it's populated a little. In the meantime, does anyone object if it takes the "Stress hotline" slot? the hotline gets so little traffic ... -- ROGER DAVIES talk 09:52, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
This is taking shape and editors are voluntering satisfactorily. We're a bit light on language skills so any contributions would be very welcome. Any ideas on other areas the logistics dept could tackle? Any comments or crirticims on it generally? -- ROGER DAVIES talk 22:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)