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Status report for April 4

Without further ado:

Ongoing work
  • Contest: We seem to have made some progress on getting the contest running, with a few editors now submitting entries. Barring anything unforseen happening, I plan on mothballing the old collaboration at the end of the week, which should wrap that aspect of it up fairly neatly.
  • Publication: I've made some initial attempts at putting together a work area for the "selected readings" prototype WikiReader, but more thought is obviously needed in terms of how we arrange things there. Aside from that, we still don't really have any consensus on what topic we could try for an initial topic-centered reader; a number of possibilities have been proposed, but there's been minimal discussion. Thoughts on how to best proceed with that would be very welcome!
  • Requests: The central requests area has been substantially sorted out by task force; much thanks to LordAmeth, as usual. We have a number of "lists" waiting for the creation of some of the proposed task forces; once that's done, all that will be left will be a fairly short list of things that can't readily be identified.
Future work
  • Tagging/assessment drive: I've made some progress on putting together the category-parsing script; unfortunately, it's not quite ready for full use yet, as it dies on the more convoluted category structure at some points. Hopefully I'll have that fixed in fairly short order, though.
  • Infobox conversion drive: I think we ought to try and wrap up the instructions for the remaining conversions, so that we can fully open this up to the entire project membership.
  • Categorizing people: This has been the elephant in the room for almost a year now; we've never quite managed to come up with any comprehensive yet practical plan for approaching this category tree. I think that, once the shuffling with the new departments and so forth dies down a bit, we can probably bring this discussion back up once more (hopefully for the last time).
Task forces
  • We have a bunch of proposals now outstanding; I'm seriously considering creating at least a few of them (particularly the Southeast Asian and South American ones) even with minimal interest, simply because we really need them as a place to shuffle all the material on these topics to.
  • I've raised the question of whether we want to have a Middle Eastern task force absorb the existing (but basically inactive) Ancient Near Eastern one, but that hasn't really gotten much feedback; comments would be appreciated.
Miscellany
  • Awards: We're about to have our first award of the new WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves. Additional nominations would be very welcome at this point, I think.
  • Statistics: I was thinking that it might be useful (or at least interesting) to put together some graphs showing the project membership, the distribution of articles, etc., over time. Comments on this and ideas for what we may want to graph would be appreciated.

As usual, comments on these or any other issues would be very appreciated! Kirill Lokshin 17:00, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

Good job again. I think we reached a consensus somehow re WikiReader. Punic Wars?! -- FayssalF - Wiki me up ® 17:28, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, I certainly have no objections to going with the Punic Wars, if we have some editors interested in working on it. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 04:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Some graphs would be nice - project membership and article distribution by assessment class would be a good place to start, I think. Carom 00:57, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Okay, will do. Kirill Lokshin 04:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Punic Wars is OK. I have finished working through several books on the topic by now and think that I can bring the articles in shape and write a wikireader. At the moment Latin keeps me quite busy. However, none of Mohammed Fantar's works so far and he might have some interesting points. As soon as I get more active again(and don't have to cope with a defective keyboard), I'm starting the Punic Wars.
I wrote it in the contest section, some prizes might be of interest. Wandalstouring 10:19, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
So, anyone have an opinion on the Middle Eastern task force issue? Kirill Lokshin 13:14, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't have any problem with the new Middle East task force absorbing the Ancient Near Eastern one. Carom 14:58, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've created the Middle Eastern military history, South American military history, and Southeast Asian military history task forces, and merged the Ancient Near Eastern warfare one into the new Middle Eastern military history one. Hopefully we'll be able to absorb some of the abandoned old projects into these, as well. Kirill Lokshin 01:33, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally, RM Gillespie's award nomination could really use some more people commenting. :-) Kirill Lokshin 01:53, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
Note: I've gone ahead and mothballed the collaboration department, as the contest appears to be active, and there haven't been any objections to the changeover. Kirill Lokshin 23:41, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Just dropping by to let y'all know that I've finished (finally!) with the requests page. All that remains now on that page is a short list of Central American / Caribbean topics which we couldn't categorize to an existing task force, and another short list of items which can't be easily identified. That was good fun... now let's get out and start changing some of those red links to blue! LordAmeth 23:54, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! Kirill Lokshin 00:07, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

A (brief) update on my attempts to set up for an assessment drive: the general script now works. I'm working on adding a blacklist of categories not to parse through, mainly due to the fact that the way the American Civil War category tree pulls in a large number of top-level state categories (e.g. Category:Virginia) is adding in several tens of thousands of obviously irrelevant articles. Overall, though, I suspect the raw number of articles somewhere under Category:Military or Category:War will be in the 100,000–150,000 range even with the blacklist. Obviously, a large portion of these will be false positives caused by various quirks in the category scheme; but if even a quarter of them wind up being legitimately in-scope, that'll be a massive improvement to the coverage of our assessment system.

Any comments would be very welcome! Kirill Lokshin 03:33, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Great news, it'll be nice to start closing the holes in our tagging. A question: how do you want to procede with the assessment drive? Something along the lines of what WP:BIO recently finished up?Carom 04:12, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
That could work, I suppose. I've put together a (crude) structural shell at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Drive; it's mostly just the schema needed for the actual list pages to work now, and explanatory material can be added as desired. Kirill Lokshin 04:15, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
There are, obviously, benefits to soliciting help from the broader community, particularly if we're having a defined "drive" with set start and endpoints and goals (and the promise of barnstars, etc). Working through 150,000 articles (or whatever the total ends up being) is no small task, and we might need all the help we can get. On the other hand, we do have a large membership pool to draw from, so we might concievably manage this in-house, although it will take a little while to get things back under control. Carom 04:45, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Two quick requests, for any coordinators with some free time:

  • If you haven't stopped by the awards page, RM Gillespie's nomination could definitely use some more comments one way or the other.
  • The new Southeast Asian task force has been pretty extensively advertised, but I don't think anyone has notified the related projects of the Middle Eastern and South American task forces; if someone could drop a note with at least a few of the more active ones for each topic area, that'd be very helpful for getting some initial recruitment, I think.

Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 03:45, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Improving Review Process Participation

Kirill and I have been discussion a possible way to improve participation in the various review processes (FAR, FAC, A-Class, Peer Review), and are working on ways to notify individual members of reviews that may appeal to them. You can read our discussion so far here and here, but the short form is that we would like to compile a list of project members by their stated interests (on the active members list) and use this as a basis for manual notification of new reviews. Any thoughts? Carom 01:38, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

As an addendum, you can find the (nascent) page here. Carom 01:56, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
That's mostly a copy of our task forces. Wouldn't it be a better idea to try them as notification board? Yes, in some task forces it will take forever/never to get a reaction but they are our existing structure of interest-specific clustering and the problem is rather recruiting manpower than a lack of information that something needs a review. Wandalstouring 17:26, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
We do already leave notices at each task force; the idea here is to additionally leave personal requests on the talk pages of at least some potentially interested contributors. I think it's a legitimate assumption that personal messages produce a more effective response than general notices do. (The obvious issue here being that not everyone is a compulsive watchlist-checker; something which pops up a "You have new messages" bar is a much faster way of getting a response than just leaving notes in a central place.) In addition, of course, we have numerous members that are interested in a topic but haven't signed up for a task force on it (for whatever reason), or have signed up but haven't watchlisted the task force page. Kirill Lokshin 17:33, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
It's interesting to note that there are only 27 editors signed up for the ACW task force (of whom three or four are inactive), while there are 37 active editors who have an interest in the American Civil War (according to their entry on the members page). The disparity for WWI promises to be even greater. While task forces serve a lot of useful functions, they aren't an automatic gathering place for everyone with an interest in the topic (and experience shows us that leaving notices with each task force doesn't guarantee lots of contributions at the reviews). Carom 17:48, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm still skeptic that people will sign up there who did not sign up in the task forces. Creating notification mails on task force basis would be my option. Wandalstouring 09:43, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Oh, we're not expecting anyone to sign up there directly—the idea is that we will add them to the appropriate places based on what they note as their interests when they sign up on the main member lists. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 13:11, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
On the other hand, maybe it would be simpler to go ahead and invite new members with a declared interest but not signed up in the corresponding task force to join the task force? That way, we could just use the task force membership lists for finding people to invite to reviews, without the need to maintain a secondary list just for that purpose. Kirill Lokshin 13:34, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Possibly, although maintaining a separate list allows us to have whatever "categories" we like, even if they are not task forces. Also, once the lists are constructed, it makes it easier to find a list of editors to invite to a particular review (although constructing the lists is quite time consuming). Carom 14:55, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
True, that. Using the existing task force lists will mean that we need to maintain an active/inactive split for each, as well. So your approach does seem to be the more suitable one. Kirill Lokshin 15:33, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
OK, so you want to create a list of people that we judge useful to call. The trick behind this is social pressure, they are honored and feel obliged to respond. That's OK, but I think we could employ this mechanism slightly modified. My idea would be to create a formal position: reviewer (and give them a nice infobox). The selection process and calling them for their business can be handled similar to the wikipedia administrators. It has the benefit that we don't have to judge everybody's fields of interest and competence, but rather the one calling for a reviewer is likely to ask someone he thinks appropriate or within this small group of reviewers someone more knowledgeable can be consulted. Creating a board where such information can be stored would be a good idea in my opinion. The issue that bothers me is volunteering people without their consent. Wandalstouring 16:55, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, we wouldn't really be "volunteering" anyone, would we? All that we'll be doing is (occasionally) leaving them a note along the lines of "Based on your interests, we would like to invite you to take part in this review; thank you for any comments you might have to offer"; we're neither obligating them to take part (although I suspect that most people will be happy to do so), nor publicizing the list such that people requesting reviews will be approaching them directly (all the messages will be filtered through the coordinators, and we can make sure that people aren't being overloaded with dozens of requests). Keep in mind that the idea here is not to create an "expert review", per se, but rather simply to get more participation; the people we invite don't need to be subject-matter experts, but just interested enough in the topic that they'd reasonably consider taking some time to review the article.
(If somebody complains about the messages, we can easily them off the list, obviously; but, based on my experience, people will, at worst, not take part in the reviews when invited. Very few people will react negatively when someone asks for their assistance.) Kirill Lokshin 17:03, 6 April 2007 (UTC)


Indeed. The intent isn't to either press editors into service or create an "expert" review system, but to solicit contributions from a broader range of editors. They are free to participate or not (and they are certainly free to request that we not notify them of future reviews), and I would hope that no-one would attempt to pressure editors into taking part in activities in which they have no interest. Carom 21:28, 6 April 2007 (UTC)
I suggest a slight modification. If you list someone do immediatly give word, about where and with what specifications he is listed, to the person concerned and ask for his consent. Wandalstouring 19:46, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, the request boilerplates currently being used (e.g. this one) already include a rather prominent way to opt out of further mailings; considering that (a) the rate of requests will be quite low—I suspect that many members will may never even get one—and (b) the number of people opting out can be expected to be only a small portion of the total membership, I think letting those editors that don't want to be asked for help say so at their own discretion would be more productive than sending out lots of messages ahead of time as a contingency for something that may not even take place. Kirill Lokshin 19:55, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
(After edit conflict) The full list of boilerplates that we're using are:
They seem to, as Kirill points out, already address your concerns. If this is not the case, what modifications would you suggest? Carom 19:59, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I took my time to answer carefully: It looks OK. Wandalstouring 11:13, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Status report for April 20

Things seem to have quited down quite a bit over the past few weeks, so this will be pretty short:

  • The publication department appears to be moving along now, if a bit haphazardly. We'll have to see where this new podcast idea takes us in practice, but it seems like a very interesting development in theory.
  • The South American task force and the contest department could both use a bit of advertising, I think; if anyone has any good ideas for where we could drop off notes or whom we could invite, they'd be very appreciated.
  • Further nominations for the WikiChevrons w/ Oak Leaves would be a good idea, if anyone has some worthy candidates in mind. Beyond that, we should probably make an effort to give out the regular WikiChevrons more frequently; given how things have been going, anything that'll help with editor morale would be a good thing.
  • At some point we'll probably want to return to the never-completed discussion of categories for military personnel. Frankly, I'm not particularly looking forward to trying to make sense of it, as it's an absurdly complicated structure with lots of problems with naming and terminology; but we'll have to do it sooner or later, I suppose, unless we're willing to resign ourselves to having it completely ad-hoc.

If anyone has comments on these points, or on anything else I didn't mention, please feel free to dive in. :-) Kirill Lokshin 21:02, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

Seems like quite this term a lot of coordinators are still around. (But where is Peter?)
  • The podcasts(I'm a bit involved with) will be different from articles in the aspect that they are stable. If such a cast is created, we might think about a very good review process before it is aired.
  • We had this editor who was all fire and flame for Latin America, perhaps he can make some friends. I will contact him and let him loose on some areas where he can possibly recruit.
  • I would nominate a few guys/gals, but they have to be around or respond. User:Semperf and User:Jagged_85 are a good candidates for example.
  • I suggest to have a big discussion and tell everybody via newsletter before we categorize the military personnel. At the moment it's quite calm on the talk page, so we could give it a try. Some prelimenary suggestions might be beneficial. Wandalstouring 11:38, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Peter seems to be on extended WikiBreak; but I suppose it's to be expected that not everyone will be around all the time. ;-)
As far as starting up a discussion on military personnel goes, it may be a good approach to follow through on the last idea that the previous discussion came up with: breaking down the tree into more manageable branches and considering each one separately, so as not to spend all of our time trying to keep track of the discussion itself. Of the various things to consider, two stand out as likely the most convoluted, so I think it might be a good idea to look at them early on:
  • Categorization by country/nationality (i.e. "French generals" versus "Generals of France" and that whole mess)
  • Categorization by rank (i.e. "soldiers" versus "enlisted personnel" versus "military personnel", etc.)
We could probably start off with either of those sometime in the near future, which would be convenient in terms of being able to advertise the discussion in the April newsletter. Kirill Lokshin 00:02, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Kirill, I didn't quite understand your comment regarding "how things have been going" - were you refering to all the things that ahve been going on in the wider community, or is there some particular unrest within the project?
As far as the categorization goes, I think a somewhat piecemeal approach may be beneficial - the two problems you have pointed to promise to be difficult ones (and I suspect that no-one will be happy with the final result). However, it we can reach some consensus on country/nationality and rank, that would be a good start. Carom 01:16, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
I meant the wider community; I think, in general, we're seeing (moreso than usual) issues with people getting burned out over various issues, and I think that making more effort to help editors feel appreciated would probably be beneficial. (I'm not aware of anything unusual in the project specifically in this regard; we do, obviously, see some editor burnout, as does every project, but I haven't seen anything particularly worrying or peculiar.) Kirill Lokshin 04:10, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Ah, OK. That makes sense - I was concerned that I'd missed something . Carom 15:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
We might introduce something to counsel these upcoming burnout cases. Oldwindybear for example is someone really capable of calming down most people before they burnout. Usually the issue comes along with problematic and frustrating disputes. My idea is to create a rather general task force that specifically deals with problematic issues and that would be a rallying point for quality editors (oldwindybear, Beit Or, semperf, ALR just to name a few) Wandalstouring 15:33, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, barring any objections here, we should probably start up a discussion on the categorization issue (starting, perhaps, with the country/nationality bit, but this can be changed as desired) in the next few days, so that it can be added to the upcoming newsletter (which will presumably go out around the end of the month). Kirill Lokshin 19:07, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
No objections here; let's start with country/nationality. Carom 19:25, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've started the discussion at WT:MILHIST#Military personnel categories (by nation). Kirill Lokshin 23:13, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

-Hello all. I've just noticed that a large number of articles have appeared in our unassesed category which, for some time, consisted of nothing but USS naval ships. Obviously, this is not a problem, and is in fact a good thing as it means that tons more stuff has been found and properly project-tagged. Just purely out of curiosity, therefore, I am wondering if this is the result of that bot effort we talked about some time ago, or if that is still in the works, and this is just the result of some active user(s). Looks like we have some more assessing fun to do! :) LordAmeth 17:02, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Check the edit history and you will find out. Wandalstouring
Duh. Of course. Thanks. LordAmeth 17:59, 28 April 2007 (UTC)

Slightly belatedly, the newsletter for April: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter April 2007. I'd appreciate if someone could check it over before I send it off to the bot for distribution. Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 15:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Carom 15:18, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've handed it off to Grafikm for distribution. Kirill Lokshin 14:24, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Organizational chart of our categories

I suggest to create an organizational chart of our different categories, preferably as a template with an unhide function for more and more specific subcategories. Wandalstouring 08:06, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

Mmm, what exactly are you looking for here? We already have an annotated listing of the top-level categories on the project page. It'd be trivial to create a full, expandable tree:
Military
Military by location
Military branches
Types of military forces
War
Military fiction
Military lists
Works about the military
Military writers
Military activity in the Antarctic region
Military art
Military awards and decorations
Military comparisons
Military culture
Military diplomacy
Military disbanding and disarmament
Military economics
Military firefighting
Health and military
Military history
Military industry
Military law
Mass media of the military
Military defense
Military ethics
Military typefaces
Military organization
Military-related organizations
Military personnel
Military planning
Quotations from military
Military reforms
Military roads
Military science
Military strategy
Military symbols
Military terminology
Military units and formations
Military volunteering
Military images
Military stubs
(as is done on Portal:War), but frankly trying to actually annotate more than the first few levels and the general rules governing the subsidiary trees (both of which we already do) seems like it would take a lot more time than would be worthwhile. Kirill Lokshin 16:17, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
I don't think so. A browseable list would be more helpful to find out how the coverage of certain subjects than our task force approach. Wandalstouring 10:08, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
What about changing these lists into a template (similar to our project's template with an unhide function) and removing the repeated military, once in the header is enough. At the bottom level we do have lists like the wikiproject Japan, so that you can see the status of articles within each category and eventually additional info like our B-class rating. Wandalstouring 17:13, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
Assuming, for the sake of discussion, that such a listing would be useful (and I'm not really convinced that anyone would actually want to go through it rather than simply browsing the categories, once things got to a certain level of complexity), how would this be maintained?
We have, at a minimum, 30,000+ articles and several thousand categories within our remit. Simply getting these all into a list by hand would be an enormous undertaking; actually continuously keeping it updated would be completely impossible, in my opinion. We had trouble with a manual listing of a few hundred articles (i.e. the original project worklist); this would be several orders of magnitude larger. I don't really see where we'd find the vast pool of manpower needed for this sort of thing. Kirill Lokshin 23:17, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
So you do state that the complete category branches are quite useless now, because I don't suggest to make them any more complex. All the data is bot readable(an issue I always do take care about if I suggest something that needs maintainance), so we can find a solution. The question is rather is there any objection other than 'manpower'? Wandalstouring 14:18, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Mmm, fair enough; if you're intending to automate it rather than do it by hand, the manpower issue is much less of a problem. (You'd essentially want a fully recursive version of PockBot, coupled with a more sophisticated output.)
Aside from that, I personally don't have any particularly important objections. There are a number of technical issues to consider, obviously—how to split the chart over multiple pages (it'll be far too big to fit on one), how to deal with untagged articles (ideally we'd get a separate list of them to deal with, apart from the actual chart), and so forth—and I'm not convinced that people will find such an exhaustive listing useful; but, as long as actually maintaining it does not become a major time-sink, I don't have any real problem with creating it. Kirill Lokshin 14:57, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
OK, than I will go along and see how the technical issues can be solved and what the feedback is. Wikiproject Japan could be a possible partner. Wandalstouring 14:34, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

contacts

No, I don't post here to keep Kirill busy. Another idea that came to my mind is to create something different from the task forces because these don't represent the project's whole community and we do have quite a lot of active editors who create a bulk of information without being member of a specific task force. My idea is to collect information about recognized editors and keep them in a maintained (by the coordinators) list on display.

The nomination process is the same as with our awards, but we may cut it to a support by two coordinators plus the nominee has to accept and clarify for what subjects he wants to be "contact" for. The title of the so awarded is "contact". S/He receives a nice userbox and some obligations: answer direct questions and peer reviews on his subject. In return he has the great honor to be listed as one of our contacts underneath our taskforces(this list is likely a mixture between our categories and our task forces). The coordinators do maintain the contactship and can denominate or send on vacation if there are problems with a contact or s/he can't be sufficiently active any more. So far any other suggestions? Wandalstouring 07:54, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Seems like an interesting idea. Some things to consider:
  • The obvious question: will anyone actually want to become an official contact? I suppose there's no way to know without a public discussion.
  • How fine-grained do we want the topics to be? In other words, are we looking for "contact for World War II" or "contact for the role of the 312th Infantry Regiment in the Battle of Stalingrad"? I would assume the former would be more useful, but can we reasonably expect people to deal with broad topic areas?
  • Is there a more descriptive title than "contact" (which, IMHO, doesn't say enough)? Perhaps "subject-area contact" or "topical contact"?
Kirill Lokshin 18:30, 7 May 2007 (UTC)
Contact is the best description of the function(like coordinator). The editor himself does describe what his topic is and we do decide whther or not he is a contact with that description. Sometimes a unit like the SAS or the Brandenburger can be important enough to have one contact. So there is a minimum of guidelines, leaving enough space for common sense. There are people who want to be coordinators, so there are possibly people who want to be contacts. It is also one of the greatest honors. Of course, we need a public discussion, but I wanted to present it here first and iron out possible misconceptions. Wandalstouring 21:44, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Modification of our welcome

I suggest to modify our welcome, so it explains some rules of our anarchy. I really get sick of people posting on the talk page what stub urgently needs someone's help. Wandalstouring 17:18, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

We could probably add a friendly reminder about the proper avenues for reuqesting expansion (i.e., adding it to the "Things you can do" templates, etc.). Carom 17:42, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Is it really that big of an issue, though? The requests aren't that frequent; and I don't want to put us in the position of biting newbies because they don't know where to make them. I'd just let it pass unless someone is doing it constantly (in which case they can be spoken with individually). Kirill Lokshin 18:05, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

How to handle publications

Kirill's best of album approach is certainly the easiest way to create a publication. Our podcaster reports that he does make progress, so he will possibly present results. What came to my mind was an idea to structure the whole publication issue into small steps that make things easier.

The basic step is reaching A-class/FA with an article/group of articles. This/These article/s can be modified into a podcast script. Additional is the opportunity watch respective images or small films simultaneously. Next step would be to create a whole powerpoint(or else) presentation with the podcast as speaker. Of course, a small downloadable handout helps the presentation to perform much better. Final step is to expand the handout into a complete wikireader.

To help things run smoothly I suggest a slight modification in fundraising. Donations can be made directly for each available publication and the creators (can be the individual creators or a wikiproject) have a right to suggest how wikipedia uses a share of the respective funds. Most important is in my opinion that every publication does receive a professional review as soon as possible and we do mark all stuff with a professional review.(If we expand this review to our FA for example there should be a possibility to go to the last professionally reviewed version. With our publications we don't have this problem, because they are stable.) Next step is improving sound and buying images/films (We don't have and we don't get all the stuff we need. Of course it's not us who directly buys the stuff, but the wikipedia team. We do only specify what we want.). The money gained with the cheaper earlier steps does also help to buffer the financial risk of printing a wikireader and paying for its prior professional review(the most important issue to make the material trustworthy and this way worth the money). Such a change needs a strong support by the project and I will want to wait with the discussion until we have created something. Wandalstouring 17:41, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Interesting idea, but keep in mind that any financial aspects to this are opening up a huge can of worms as far as actually managing the transactions is concerned, not to mention putting us in an extremely uncomfortable position should we fail to actually produce a final publication.
(Keep in mind that, for various reasons, the Wikimedia Foundation does not want to be the "publisher" of such works, which introduces all sorts of limitations in terms of how money can change hands.) Kirill Lokshin 18:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Umph, I'm not entirely comfortable with the financial aspect of this - can you perhaps clarify how it might operate? Carom 21:36, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Yes, the financial aspect is the dangerous part. We don't own the money under any circumstances (and we don't directly buy anything with the money), we only post a suggestion how it could be spent according to wikipedia policies. How much our suggestion is considered worth, depends on how much money we helped to organise via fundraising publications. The problem, how the profits from wikireaders(other publications) can be used, is an issue the Wiki Headquarters(whatever name they use for this operation) presumably solved, so we only suggest uses they didn't yet consider. Wandalstouring 10:17, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Ads

Here's a question: I recently came across this template, which is essentially a template for Wikipedia-related ads that can be placed in userspace. Without getting into extended discussion about whether or not Wikipedia should have ads, do people here think we should submit (or ask for help in creating) an ad for use in this template? Carom 17:46, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

No. We do have a userbox with a link. I think that's enough and these ads make a project look more like a casino or a penis enlargement company(the ones who found out my email adress). Wandalstouring 17:54, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Heh, and I was all ready with an ad that said "Not satisfied with your size? Join WPMILHIST!"... Carom 18:01, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Must... avoid... making... comments... about... big... weapons... Kirill Lokshin 18:14, 8 May 2007 (UTC)
Oh, that would indeed make a target of jests...Dryzen 14:39, 9 May 2007 (UTC)
There's a big difference between "ads" as in "paid advertisements, on article pages, from outside entities for products unrelated to Wikipedia", and "ads" as in "images on user pages to generate awareness of WikiProjects". The former is something many people are opposed to, but the latter is harmless and apart from anything else has been going on for ages in the form of userboxes and the like.
Anyway, it seems someone else from your project requested an ad, because one was made and added to the template a few days ago:
Doesn't look much like a penis enlargement company to me. And no, I don't know your email address – Gurch 09:13, 29 June 2007 (UTC)
Well, what people choose to create is their own business, really. I do think that it may be best to avoid endorsing this (or any other) banner ad as a project, at least until such things become more accepted within the community as a whole. Kirill 15:57, 29 June 2007 (UTC)

Award nomination

Just a note for anyone that hasn't seen it yet: Kevin Myers' nomination for the WikiChevrons w/ OL has been sitting for some time with no additional comments. If some more coordinators could drop by, that'd be great. Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 05:17, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Sure, I'll drop by and have a look. Kyriakos 14:18, 25 May 2007 (UTC)

Contacts

The contacts are waiting for some activity, too. Wandalstouring 17:35, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

A new contact has been nominated. Please drop by and leave a note. Wandalstouring 02:00, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Specialization

I suggest that we write down our existing system of labor division, so we do have a better overview.

I'm going to keep an eye on the contacts. Wandalstouring 10:12, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Status report for June 17

It's been quite a while since we've had one of these; I suppose the fault is mostly mine—I haven't been as active as I would have liked for the past two months—and for that I apologize. I'll try to return these to a more regular schedule now that I'm not quite so overloaded off-Wiki.

Somewhat briefly, a few points of salient interest:

  • Category organization: the previous discussions basically ended with no practical resolution, so I've tried my hand at a summarize-and-restart approach; hopefully we'll be able to get at least a few of these issues settled soon.
  • Awards: we now have our first nomination by a non-coordinator; it's probably a sign that the award is beginning to attract some more interest.
  • Contacts: the organizational side of things seems to be proceeding smoothly; much thanks to Wandalstouring, who has been keeping the thing running. I'll try to add in some code to allow the list of contacts to be partially transcluded into the main project page soon.
  • Tagging/assessment drive: will be coming Real Soon Now(tm). I think I have the scripts set up correctly now; I just need time to run them and then upload the results.

Any comments on these or any other issues would be appreciated. Kirill Lokshin 03:03, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

If the discussion achieves no results, try to develop a system and ask if people think it is OK. Might be a more workable approach.
I would like to add contacts with corresponding subjects to the respective task force pages. On the long run this would result in a merger of two systems. Our old a cluster of interest via task forces and the dedicated contacts with their subjects. A problem is that there has been little need for the contacts in practice so far. Wandalstouring 10:30, 18 June 2007 (UTC)
Good news related to the tagging/assessment drive: the current WP:BIO assessment drive has gone through about 30,000 articles in the past three weeks. Obviously, our drive will require a little more time spent with each article, and probably won't move so fast, but I think it's encouraging to see that a project of this nature can be worked through fairly quickly. Carom 22:47, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

June newsletter

Is presumably ready: Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter June 2007. I'd appreciate someone checking over to see whether I've missed anything of interest. Kirill 01:06, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Carom 01:27, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
You could add that the contacts are working and we are looking for more capable editors to join. Wandalstouring 05:30, 3 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, done. I'll ask Grafikm to send this one out, then. Kirill 15:28, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Proofreading publications

I suggest that we try to get some professionals (professors or someone else with a university degree/professional experience on the subject) to proofread our intended publications and write a few sentence that we can add to each chapter + who wrote them. This way a feeling of trust in the content is created. Wandalstouring 05:44, 3 July 2007 (UTC)

Status report for July 9

I've completed an initial script run in preparation for the tagging & assessment drive. The results:

  • Number of categories examined: 15,468
  • Number of untagged articles: 165,154

(this all generated based on descent from Category:Military and Category:War). Obviously, we're looking at enormous numbers of false positives here, mostly due to the fact that high-level categories are being pulled in for various bizarre reasons (e.g. due to careless categorization of city categories, such as "Military to Military_history to Warfare_by_era to Warfare_of_the_Medieval_era to Crusades to Jerusalem to Religion_in_Jerusalem..."). The question, then, is this: do we proceed with simply dumping all of these lists and relying on drive participants to weed through the false positives, or do we need a more sophisticated script before we throw this out to the project at large?

Aside from that, a couple of minor points:

  • We have an award nomination that's been sitting there for a while now; if a few more people could drop by, that'd be great.
  • Going by a six-month schedule, the next election would be coming up sometime in August. I was thinking we could just copy all the procedural stuff from the last one; does anyone have objections (or simply other ideas) to that?

Comments on any of this—or anything else—would be very welcome! Kirill 05:27, 9 July 2007 (UTC)

concerning the election: I suggest 9 coordinators and hopefully some emphasis on longterm activity. Wandalstouring 08:33, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Ye, I think that the elections should be the same as last time except with 9 coordinator positions. I also think we should nominate so more people. Kyriakos 09:20, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Nine coordinators seems fine, assuming we have enough candidates; we'll need to clear it with the project as a whole, but I rather doubt anyone would have a problem with it. As for nominations: prod editors whose work you're familiar with to run once the election opens. ;-) Kirill 14:26, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I definitely have the Awards page "watched", but it never seems to turn up on my watchlist when I run down the changes for the day. Sorry to be so lax in paying attention to it. As for the false positives, I wonder if maybe we should open it up to the project, see how much gets done in terms of people sorting through the false positives and fixing it - popular contributions worked beautifully for getting the unassessed list down X months ago, and I think is continuing to do so. At then at some point, when some proportion of activity in sorting through these has been seen to be effective, we can run it again, perhaps with a better script. LordAmeth 11:38, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Infrequently-edited pages tend to be hard to spot in the watchlist sometimes; I've found that using the "changes" link on the navigation template is more helpful for keeping track of what's going on in the project at times than the watchlist is. Kirill 14:26, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
I concur with LordAmeth about the tagging/assessment. Let's open it up to the project and see what happens. If the success of the WP:BIO assessment drives is anything to go by, we should be able to get through the backlog in a couple of months, give or take.
Adding more coordinators doesn't seem particularly problematic to me, although I agree with Wandalstouring that we should place greater emphasis on long-term activity. Other than that, we can probably proceed as usual with regards to the election. Carom 17:21, 9 July 2007 (UTC)
Another note: some previous discussion on the tagging drive can be found here. Carom 18:30, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

contacts

There is again someone new running for contact. Please drop by. Wandalstouring 18:13, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I plan to merge our contacts into the existing task force structure by listing respective subject-area contacts above the list of participants. Any objections? Wandalstouring 15:28, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Are you planning to just hand-copy stuff between the task force pages and the main contacts page? Or obsolete the central listing and move everything to only reside on the task force pages? The first seems like it would be more work, but it would have the benefit of retaining the central list & explanation.
A third option may be something like what's done with the transcluded awards listing; rather than copying the entire contact entry, just copy over the username and add a link to the actual entry in the central list. This would require a bit more setup to work neatly, but would minimize the amount of duplicated information. Kirill 17:32, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

Another renaming discussion...

As an extension of the new (well, not so new any more) naming conventions, there's a discussion here regarding a standardized naming convention for German units from various eras. Some further opinions would be appreciated, if anyone has time, as the discussion is suffering from a lack of participants. Carom 15:04, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

A class before FA nomination

I suggest a new rule that FA candidates should pass our A class review first. If you look through our current nominations, you will find the troubled candidates among the ones without prior A class review. Wandalstouring 11:14, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like a good idea, but at the same time, FA isn't within our jurisdiction. Also, I've always felt that, to whatever extent that anything on WP is "official policy", things like FA are far more official than anything a WikiProject does. We're just "suggested guidelines". That's my personal opinion on the matter - but if you and Kirill and others think this is something we can actually institute, go for it; I'm behind you guys as always. LordAmeth 12:26, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Supporting. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 13:22, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I don't think this is realistically enforceable. We don't have any power to stop people from bypassing A-class if they so choose (and I'm not sure I would want that power if it were available). Also: while it might, in theory, stop editors from clogging FAC with articles that have no hope of achieving consensus, it seems like an unnecessary step for experienced FA writers. While I certainly recommend that articles pass A-class before going to FAC, I think it would be a Bad Idea to implement a rule to that effect. Carom 13:33, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
(edit conflict) It's not something we can institute, in my opinion. While we can certainly recommend it, we have no way of forcing compliance. (We could, I suppose, try to object to any FAC that didn't go through A-Class; but if we do that to articles that are of FA quality, people will simply stop taking us seriously as a project.) And, in any case, there are certainly editors who know enough about FAC that going through the A-Class review wouldn't be all that necessary for them.
So I don't really see how this would work, or why we would need something this draconian. If some FACs aren't ready, it's not a big deal; it's the nominator's problem moreso than ours. Kirill 13:36, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
While we won't institute it, we can at least use the "rule" as a criterion when participating at the nomination process. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 14:02, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, and get laughed out of FAC when we start objecting to perfectly good articles because they didn't fill out form 308.1b in triplicate. ;-) Kirill 14:07, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
We got the "riffles"! hahahha! -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 14:11, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
308.1b? Is that like an eye-dee-ten-tango form? LordAmeth 16:23, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
I think the easiest approach to take would be to use A-Class as a suggestion when objecting, but not as a rationale in and of itself. In other words, if you find problems with an article and are going to object anyways, say something like:
  • Object, blah blah blah. Suggest taking the article through an A-Class review prior to nomination, etc.
On the other hand, if you're not going to object except for the lack of a review, just go ahead and support. This puts us in a good position to exert some gentle pressure on the editors that should be using it, while at the same time avoiding a situation where we look like we care more about bureaucracy than the article itself. Kirill 14:16, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
A clever and very reasonable way indeed. -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 14:19, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Agreed. There is no way of forcing someone to do it but we should recommend it. Kyriakos 14:40, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
So the new standard is an oppose with a kind suggestion for an A class review if an article seems not fit for FA. Wandalstouring 14:59, 12 July 2007 (UTC)
Unless someone w/ a support vote points out to this thread and accuse us of conspiracy ;) -- FayssalF - Wiki me up® 15:17, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

Assessment drive

Okay, I've finally uploaded all of the generated lists; see Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Drive. If there are no last-minute objections, can we go ahead officially start the drive? Kirill 02:35, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

No objections here - let's get it started (this thread may make interesting reading as we get this going, though). Carom 02:37, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Tag them and I will do the B-class assessment when I have some more spare time. Wandalstouring 11:54, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've made an announcement of sorts at WT:MILHIST#Tagging and assessment drive; please feel free to add any comments there if you'd like. Kirill 13:00, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Incidentally, if anyone has other ideas for places where this should be announced, I'm all ears. ;-) Kirill 13:04, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
Food for thought: would it be a good idea to add this to WP:CN? Or would that be overly pretentious of us? Kirill 05:09, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Not sure if you have the right shortcut there, Kirill - did you want the community bulletin board? The community noticeboard seems to be for dispute resolution... Carom 05:17, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah, yes, I did mean the other community noticeboard; thanks for catching that! (I sometimes wonder why people can't come up with more unique names for these things... ;-) Kirill 05:27, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, nondescript names are the only ones that can achieve consensus, after all... ;) I don't think that would be pretentious, although wider exposure will probably summon all the old arguments regarding a) the spread of project banners on article talk pages, and b) the failings of large-scale assessment drives (witness the long-ish discussion generated by the Biography assessment drive that I linked somewhere above). That said, I think we might as well summon as much help as possible, and field complaints, etc. if and when they arise. Carom 05:46, 17 July 2007 (UTC)
Ok, I've put up a listing; we'll see if it stays up. Kirill 13:55, 18 July 2007 (UTC)
Just a though: should we have a place for people participating in the drive to sign up? This will allow us to easily follow who is tagging and assessing in order to a) check up to make sure everything is being done correctly, and b) give awards to editors who are doing a particularly good job. Thoughts? Carom 20:29, 19 July 2007 (UTC)
Might be a worthwhile thing to do, although I don't know whether people would actually sign up before starting to assess stuff. Should we just create a section for this on the main drive page? Kirill 03:37, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, that's probably the best place - obviously, we can't force anyone to "sign up," but a little note saying something like "please sign here if you are tagging and assessing articles for this drive" might go a long way. Carom 04:17, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
Okay, I've added a section; please feel free to elaborate on the explanatory note as needed. Kirill 17:34, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
That works. Carom 17:58, 20 July 2007 (UTC)
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