Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Departments of the Military history Project

Our project has four departments which collectively account for about 90% of the total work done in our project on any given day. These departments are run internally by project with oversight from the current coordinator tranche, although in cases where the departments mirror information from other pages there may be different parties involved in the monitoring process.

With the exception of the assessment department, which is run jointly between our project and the 1.0 assessment team, all existing departments we currently run were either created by our project's coordinators following discussions on the matter or were borrowed from other projects where the concept in use was deemed to be better than what we were currently using at the time.

Below is list of the current departments run by our project and their purpose.

The Assessment Department

The assessment department of the Military history WikiProject focuses on assessing the quality of Wikipedia's military history articles. The resulting article ratings are used within the project to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work, and are also expected to play a role in the Version 1.0 Editorial Team program.

The assessment is done in a distributed fashion through parameters in the {{WPMILHIST}} project banner; this causes the articles to be placed in the appropriate sub-categories of Category:Military history articles by quality, which serve as the foundation for an automatically generated worklist.

This department is arguably the busiest in our project. On any given day a small army of articles parade through this department as Wikipedians—both within and outside our project—assess the articles deemed to be within our scope. The assessments issued are then updated in the statistics section toward the bottom half of the page; both project wide and task force specific statistics are tracked here. Each change in article statistics adds or subtracts an article from a corresponding category for the classes currently in use by the project, which allows us to track the articles within our scope in the absence of the statistics section. In addition, all articles within our scope that have a {{WPMILHIST}} template but no identifying parameters are automatically added into presorted categories for tracking.

Aside from tracking the articles within our scope by class, this page also provides two other services: a table with the current 1.0 assessment team schematic and a section in which you may request a reassessment of an article within our scope if you have been working on it and feel the article in question no longer warrants its current class rank. In the case of the latter, the table will explain the rough criteria by which we judge our articles so you can get a feel for what is expected for each class. To better illustrate the concept, links to articles that are currently assessed at the class in question are provided to allow you to read an example of each article. In the case of the request for assessment, any editor may make such a request by scrolling toward the bottom of the page; there, you will find a section titled "request for assessment". Click on the edit tab, add your article and a short comment, sign the comment and save the page. Someone will then eventually reassess the article.

The Contest Department

The contest department was introduced to our project in March 2007 as an alternative approach to the now defunct Collaboration of the Fortnight program. Originally introduced by the LBGT studies project, the contest department's aim is to encourage friendly competition among our contributors as they improve articles. At the end of the month the total number of points from improved articles is added up, and the top two contestants receive awards for their work on improving the quality of articles within our scope. In addition, the results are published in the monthly newsletter release to our project members.

This department is solely for the contest, and entering the contest is easy. Simply select an article you wish to improve and list on the page, along with its current class. At the end of the month a project coordinator will tally up the points earned during the article improvement and record this on a master chart. The top two contestants for the month receive barnstars. In 2015, to add more context to the monthly contests, the project began awarding the Military History Writers' Contest Cup to the contestant who finishes the year with the highest cumulative total of points.

The Review Department

Arguably the most important department in our scope, the review department of the Military history WikiProject is the project's main forum for conducting detailed reviews of particular articles and other content within its scope. All articles within our scope that are presently undergoing Peer Reviews and A-class Reviews are listed here, along with all currently open Good Article Candidates, Featured Article Candidates, Featured Article Reviews, Featured Article Removal Candidates, Featured List Candidates, Featured List Removal Candidates, and non-content Featured Candidacies (such as Featured Topic Candidates or Featured Picture Candidates) that fall within our scope.

In each of the above cases it is our project members that initiate the reviews in question to gain higher assessment levels for their articles or to gain feedback on how an article they are working on may be improved. All project members are also welcome to support, oppose, or comment on the articles or images undergoing review that are listed here. Of the above listed reviews, our project directly oversees only one: our in house A-class review process. These alone can be closed by any coordinators currently serving with the project, and when the coordinators close these processes Milhistbot will update the articles to reflect the closures and promotions/demotions of the articles in question.

Of the remaining process, all PRs, GANs, FACs, FLCs, FT, and FAR/FARCs are overseen at the Wikipedia level, with a selected number of delegates charged with closing these reviews and promoting/demoting the articles in question. In the case of Featured Picture Candidates, the process may be overseen either on Wikipedia, or if the image is on the Commons repository, by those at Commons; in both cases our project is not responsible for promoting or demoting images.

Since our members are responsible for providing feedback for our A-class reviews a review box has been created to allow members to better track articles currently being reviewed in the review department. The review box lists any open peer reviews, A-class reviews, and Featured Article Candidates within our scope. You are encouraged, but not required, to add the box to your user space; this can be accomplished by adding {{WPMILHIST Review alerts}} to any user page you have created.

The Incubator Department

As the name says, it is a temporary host for new groups and initiatives within the project while they gather interest and evolve into more permanent elements of the project's infrastructure. It can be used by editors who wish to form a group of editors working on a particular topic area. As a user starts a work group in the incubator, other interested editors may sign up. If a group or initiative gathers a reasonable number of interested editors and demonstrates a consistent level of activity, it can graduate from the incubator and become a full-fledged task force, special project, or project department. After evaluation by the Project coordinators, a work group is moved out of the incubator. If it does not gain enough interest, then the decision may be made not to continue with the idea.