Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/Selected anniversaries

Wikipedia:Selected anniversaries is a feature that occupies the lower right-hand side of the Main Page of Wikipedia, below the In the news section for current events.

As one might expect from the name, the section is devoted to listing notable events that occurred on the said date some years ago. A series of 5–7 sentence-long factoids are displayed. While article quality is a prominent selection criteria for content to appear on the main page, sections such as Did you know? and In the News are subject to restrictions; the articles have to be new (or newly expanded) and related to a major current event.

This is not the case for the featured article and the selected anniversaries section, and the latter is a readily available and underused piece of main page real estate.

ITN rarely has a lack of suggestions, and only a finite number can get on, while DYK is very popular and articles will generally only get only six hours on the main page. As for the day’s featured article, while an article gets a large amount of space for the whole day, the abundance of featured articles and their rate of growth is greater than one per day, on average, so quite a minority will never make it onto the cover, so to speak.

None of these apply at SA. Due to a lack of supply, there is no formal application process to speak of, and the pages for the respective days that are transcluded onto the Main Page are not protected, so anyone can add their entries. There is no prohibition or stigma with self-addition of articles, although it may be prudent to not delist another’s article in favour of one’s own.

Any article that meets current GA+ standards (and highly developed B-class articles on reasonably prominent topics) is highly likely to be good enough to raise the base standard of the current offerings; as SA entries are expected to be about events of significance, a large amount of high ranking articles, such as those on television shows, pop culture, sports, video games etc, are not eligible and therefore leave a lot of space for comprehensive and reasonably well done articles on “serious topics”. As major wars, battles, uprisings and coups are a large part of this sphere, there is much opportunity for MILHIST articles to gain a run on the main page. Note that any given article can only be the bolded item on one particular day, one cannot have it as the showpiece twice, for example, in the case of the starting and end date of a siege or military campaign.

Obviously, copyvios, articles with large swathes of unsourced content, POV problems etc, cannot be featured.

Advantages

The advantages of these include

• Articles have a full day on the main page, unlike DYK (typically six hours)
• Articles can reappear every year, unlike TFA, DYK and ITN
• Disproportionately low amount of vandalism compared to TFA. While TFAs typically receive 30,000 or more views, they are often also vandalised 50 or more times. In contrast, many, if not most DYK/SA one-liners, never get attacked once, and rarely more than twice, despite often garnering a few thousand views themselves.
• Associated articles linked in the blurb or daughter articles linked in the sections also tend to benefit from a spike, so it is advantageous to make sure that related articles are easily accessible.

All in all, it’s an efficient way of getting more readers for your (comprehensive and well done) article, with little red tape or waiting list.