Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Reviewing articles

At 6,907,186 articles and counting, Wikipedia's content grows every day. The Military history WikiProject covers some 160,000 articles which include 1510 featured articles, 149 featured lists, 32 featured topics, 544 featured pictures, 69 featured sounds, 5 featured portals, and 687 A-Class articles.

One of our most challenging goals, and one that will become increasingly important as content continues to grow, is that of article improvement. Reviewing articles is an integral part of this quality process, and can be an excellent way to help drive up the standard of our encyclopedia, to meet and work with some of our best editors, to improve your own writing and technical skills, and to recognise the work of our article builders, without whom our endeavour would come to nothing.

Wikipedia's review processes

Wikipedia uses a number of methods of varying rigour to assess article quality. These can be broadly divided into three groups:

WikiProject assessments are based on a project's quality scale; the Milhist scale can be found here. Other project scales differ, although all are historically based on the Version 1.0 original. The Military History Project uses all assessment levels, but there are some differences in emphasis at each grade. Most grades on the Milhist scale can be assigned by an individual reviewer, although in keeping with other projects and the demanding requirements of the grade, A-Class can only be awarded through our A-Class review process.

Community assessments are those conducted outside the project by encyclopedia-wide review mechanisms. Currently Wikipedia operates two: the good article and featured content processes. Good articles and topics are sometimes informally characterised as those that meet a minimum quality standard for inclusion in a serious encyclopedia, and inhabit an ill-defined area somewhere around the B/A-Class boundary. Featured content—which may be articles, lists, pictures, sounds, portals or topics—is considered to be our very best, and featured status supersedes all other rankings. Good status is awarded by individual reviewers via the GA review process, while (like Milhist A-Class) promotion to featured status requires a consensus among multiple reviewers during a featured article candidacy.

Peer reviews, unlike the other processes, assign no class or status to an article. Instead they are a way for writers to get feedback and advice on improving their work, and are often undertaken before submitting an article to a more demanding assessment, such as A-Class review or featured article candidacy. Peer reviews can be found at the Wikipedia-wide peer review page. Peer review is not be confused with Request for comment (RfC) process. Peer reviews are intended to improve articles in terms quality and content, whereas RfC is used to resolve a long standing, probably controversial issue related to an article or some other aspect of the project, through establishing consensus.

Finding articles to review

Milhist's clearing house for article reviews is our assessment department. Here you will find our article quality scale, some answers to commonly-asked questions, statistics on the articles we deal with, and links to related pages. We manage our project's Stub- to B-Class assessment work from this page. The unassessed military history articles link will take you to an automatically-generated list of all articles that have had our project banner added to their talk pages but have not yet been assigned a rating on the quality scale. A related location is the requests for assessment section, which contains Stub- to B-Class articles that (usually due to improvements) have been nominated for a reappraisal.

Another important venue is our review department. Although really just a subdivision of the assessment department, this warrants its own page because it is where Milhist in-house community reviews are managed through the A-Class review process.

In addition to Milhist's A-class review, editors may be interested in the peer review process, which is separate to the project, but has a section dedicated to History where Milhist-related articles may be listed for a review. More information about this process is listed below.

Suggestions

• To gain an understanding of the Milhist article rating system, one excellent place to start is in the above-mentioned unassessed military history articles category, where you can take on some individual review work in the Stub-, Start-, C- and B-Class range. This type of assessment is generally fairly quick to complete, although it can sometimes be tricky to make a decision in the borderline cases (but there is nothing wrong with leaving those until you feel confident in your judgement). The quality scale is essentially a hierarchy, so the criteria for Start are a development of those for Stub, C builds on Start, and so on up to B-class. For more information on what constitutes a B-class article, see this page.

• If you would rather not be in a position where you are responsible for deciding an article's status, or just want to pick up some assessment tips and help others improve their work, joining in with a peer review can be a good introduction to article reviewing. It requires no in-depth knowledge of the quality scale, and most articles are commented on by more than one reviewer so what one misses another will probably spot. Reviews range from detailed analyses that go into the minutiae of Wikipedia's Manual of Style, to observations in specific areas like images or punctuation. Constructive comments of any type are very welcome, and even if at first you can only make one or two suggestions you will soon find that, by watching other reviewers at work, your 'reviewer radar' starts to develop.

• When you feel ready, or if you already have some experience with Wikipedia's other review processes, you might like to contribute to our A-Class reviews. This is the top level of assessment available within the project, and the standard is deliberately high. Articles nominated for review are compared with the relevant criteria found on the quality scale, and need a consensus of multiple (normally three) reviewers and no outstanding criteria-based actionable opposes before they can be promoted by one of the project coordinators. A-Class reviews are a collaborative process and can remain open for a month or longer sometimes, so reviewers are expected to commit to regularly checking back on their review to respond to any developments. As with peer reviews, some reviewers specialise in certain areas while others will look at an article in its entirety. For an in-depth tutorial on reviewing A-Class article candidates, see this page.