Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Military history/Coordinators/Archive 2

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Status report for February 23

A couple of things worth mentioning, in no particular order:

1. Article tagging and assessment: We (briefly) hit a state with no unassessed articles this month, but, as the recent "finding" of ~500 articles on US submarines shows, we still have a massive number of articles that simply aren't tagged. The idea of heavy bot-tagging isn't going to work, unfortunately, since there are very large numbers of false positives under most of the higher-level categories. Instead, I'm thinking of going through the expedient of writing a script to go through everything under Category:Military and Category:War, generating a list of all the articles without a tag. Those lists can then be uploaded, and the project can go through them by hand, tagging everything that needs to be tagged. This will, admittedly, be a substantial effort; but it's really the only way we'll be able to find all the stuff that's in our scope and get it into the assessment system.
2. Tagging lists: On a related note, some help is still needed with going through Category:Non-article military history pages and retagging all the lists that have been assessed as "NA-Class" into a normal assessment level. There's probably around a hundred or so there, if anyone has some free time.
3. Project scope: On another related note, we need to have a project discussion about what our scope is insofar as depictions of military history are concerned. Obviously, actual historical works and photographs qualify as historiography, but we've not really been clear on whether not-quite-historical (e.g. Patton (film), Band of Brothers, The Death of General Wolfe) or pseudo-historical (Alexander Nevsky (film), Battle of the Bulge (film)) stuff is in-scope or not (and, if some of it is, where the line is drawn). It'll be nice to have an answer before we start on any significant tagging, as that will determine whether a lot of things need to be tagged or not.
4. Requests area migration: The migration of WP:MHREQ basically boils down, at this point, to sorting the remainder of the campaignbox redlinks into the appropriate task forces; help would be very welcome!
5. External things: The various debates about the size/layout/display/etc. of project banners are still going on (e.g. {{WikiProjectBanners}} and {{WikiProjectBannerShell}}). There's nothing so far that would have any real impact on us specifically; I'll let everyone know if something comes up, though.

We'll have a bunch of new coordinators soon; no doubt they'll be overjoyed at seeing all the stuff they can work on! ;-) Kirill Lokshin 03:19, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

1. Could we outsource the automation departement? I still believe that bots could be improved to do the task. Your solution seems workable for the current situation. Wandalstouring 17:58, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

We could try to find outside bots, I suppose; but the problem of filtering out false positives is still going to be there. We'd need to go through each sub-category by hand and figure out if the articles in it can be safely bot-tagged; and if we're doing that, it may just be easier for project members that use AWB to just tag the articles directly. Kirill Lokshin 18:03, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

It sounds like we have a lot of little projects to do. They may take some time, but this really isn't all that different from what we saw with the Unassessed articles. There are a number of us, myself included, who'll do a little bit each day, or just bite off a chunk now and then, and it'll get done. Might take a little while, but, no worries. I like the idea of bot-generating a list of potential items for tagging. That can help with this sort of thing.

As for the scope question, yeah, I think a larger discussion might be necessary. It could get quite long and complex, but hopefully we'll be able to reach a consensus in the end.

Congrats to our new coordinators, and thanks for staying & for your continuing hard work to all our continuing coordinators. This little meeting idea could work out quite nicely. I'm not sure if I have any particular concerns or problems to bring to the table right now, but when I do, I shall. Thanks all! LordAmeth 09:10, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Here's something: the task force box (i.e. the requested articles etc) for the USA task force is loaded with articles already (before we've even moved anything from the requests page), and they're in no particular order. Most of the task forces seem fine, some of them need some help in this respect. Just wanted to put it out there - we have a bit more work ahead of us than we might have expected. LordAmeth 13:37, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. Would alphabetizing the requests be helpful? It seems like it would be the easiest way to provide some order to how they're arranged, given that the wide variety makes any sort of topic-based breakdown difficult. Kirill Lokshin 13:39, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

In the African task force we have a geography-based breakdown, but considered also a chronological breakdown (with some major eras). Such a solution might be possible to implement in other task forces + a section of general topics. An alphabetical order would be some kind of order, but I question whether it would be more useful than the undorderd lists. Wandalstouring 13:59, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, admittedly, an alphabetical list of items of all different categories and time periods isn't very useful. But if we make it too complex - chronologically, for example, and then alphabetical within that - it could be a real pain to try to figure out where to add things as we do this reorganization here. Ultimately, the key thing perhaps should be some standard of organization across the task forces. LordAmeth 14:07, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I went through the Category:Military and Category:War tagging (and assessing) all articles that seem within our scope (some entries seemed too way-out). Should I work through the subcategories either (likely to be a real pain)? Wandalstouring 14:17, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, if you're really bored... ;-)

(But I would suggest waiting for the script results. We really do want a more systematic way of going through the categories, since there are tens of thousands of articles, and just doing it haphazardly by hand will mean that we'll probably miss a lot.) Kirill Lokshin 14:21, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Just give me a long list of untagged material in this categories and I can work through it (a bit like assembly-line work, the more often you do this stereotypical task in a row, the faster you get). Wandalstouring 15:11, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I'll try to put something usable together in the next few week or so. Kirill Lokshin 15:43, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

I've started off a discussion about the scope issue at WT:MILHIST#Project scope. Kirill Lokshin 22:44, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

This doesn't solve the problem regarding tagging, but ya'll might be interested in checking out this, which should speed up the process of assessing articles. Carom 05:00, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

I should also point out that the script doesn't currently support our project template. I've put in a request to add support for the MILHIST template, so that we can see how well it will work. Carom 05:49, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, it now supports our banner; the main benefit of the script is that it will allow any editor (not just those running AWB) to participate in a mass tag-and-assess drive. Carom 06:21, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Query

Hello everyone. It's me Zazzer. Well... My query is that I know that there is a coordinator for WP:MILHIST, but couldn't you have a leader for the seperate tasks that can report back to the Lead Coordinator and Assistant Coordinators about how the task itself is going? Oh well... Just a thought. -- Cheers! Zazzer 19:02, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

There aren't many (any, really) tasks within the project that require "leaders", per se; so I doubt that adding another layer of hierarchy would be particularly useful. Kirill Lokshin 19:03, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Assessing the usefulness of subleaders based on my position's authority in our anarchy and the 'strong' resonances in some projects, any such seargeants would be likely to exist only pro forma. We might be able to improve many aspects of organization (for example supply with translations, sources, CSB, maps, images, etc.), but so far clusters of people with a similar scope seemed to be the most workable approach. Wandalstouring 17:55, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Ok. Just a thought. Zazzer 03:02, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Hey guys. Its me. Zazzer. Anyways just read the comment above and though why not... Anyways I'm pretty good with translations, so if you want I'm always available. Do we have a task for translations? Ok then --Cheers! Zazzer 03:05, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

If you're looking for something to translate, you can check at the task forces associated with the language you want to translate from; if there's nothing requested there, you can just drop by WP:FAOL or Wikipedia:Translation and pick something that interests you. Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 03:30, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Task force organization

I have notice that over several months that several task forces have fallen into disregard. I think I might have a solution. Each co-ordinator is given a number of task forces to maintain and that way the task forces would be better looked after and that way we could also help Kirill decrease his large workload. And also this way we could help incorparate the assistant co-ordinators into having more jobs and responsibility.

As part of the I am think is looking at the work bar were it shows were articles need attention and etc and going through them every so often and if the article for example has been cleaned up, created or expanded it can be removed from the list. They can also try to find other articles in the task force that needs expansion etc, and add them to the list. What does everyone think? Kyriakos 05:29, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Well, I try to keep an eye on the Japanese task force - in as far as no one is truly in charge of any task force, I still like to think of that one as "mine" in whatever ways. And I certainly tag things and make notices on the task force talk page and all of this kind of stuff. But ultimately, I think that it's not really a matter of having coordinators do anything to maintain or manage, so much as it is users (editors) choosing to be involved. The task forces, like the Project as a whole, are essentially communities. People either choose to be active and involved, or they don't, and I'm not entirely sure what assigning task forces to individual coordinators would accomplish. (I'm not trying to oppose you personally or anything, this is just how I feel about it. If you can manage to get people active and involved, I'll be right behind you :) )LordAmeth 09:56, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

I conclude, task forces are clusterings of people with a common interest. We do have little influence, but to improve their working conditions. Wandalstouring 10:00, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep, pretty much. It's probably useful to do a bit of occasional prodding, but if there aren't enough editors interested in a particular topic, there's not much we can really do.

(The good thing is that the task forces themselves aren't really hurt by a lack of activity; the infrastructure is all there for when the next group of active editors in that topic arrives.) Kirill Lokshin 10:14, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Cleaning up the open task listings is, incidentally, a good thing to do; but there's no particular reason why this needs to be done on an assigned per-task-force basis; people can just go through them as the mood strikes. :-) Kirill Lokshin 10:23, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

It might be a good idea if someone feels responsible. Wandalstouring 11:17, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Check-in

Hello! As a newly elected AC, I thought I'd do a check-in to show that a) I've read the discusson, and b) give some thoughts.

• Partisans - I've found there are many articles suffering in their editorial process from partisan conflicts, often due to chauvinism. I'm wondering how to deal with them: Create an "olive branch" award for people who help diffuse or resolve such conflicts? Keep better tabs on articles in dispute?
• Task Force du jour - There are only so many editors, and there seem to be a plethora of task forces, some of which may have been ad hoc, or "seemed like a good idea at the time." Before I personally start signing up for more and more task forces, I'd like to really understand how many there are, and how active they are.
• Assessment - How do you want to handle assessment? Is it something done in an organized manner, or just done ad hoc? --Petercorless 01:23, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Welcome, welcome! Nice to see people dropping by! ;-)

As for your specific points:

• Partisans: An award might be good; we had a fairly long discussion about awards a few months ago (linked under "Notes" above) that might have some ideas. Submitting articles to peer review tends to work fairly well too (provided people actually review the things, of course).
• Task forces: We've tried to keep the task forces limited to those topics that we think have long-term organizational potential. They do tend to be fairly quiet, obviously, since the number of editors is an order of magnitude smaller than the project as a whole. I'd suggest picking one or two that you're particularly interested in and concentrating on them—particularly insofar as recruiting people to them is concerned—rather than trying to go after a lot of them; some just don't have enough active editors right now to be visibly active.
• Assessment: It's mostly ad hoc (except for the A-Class level, which is a formal review). The obvious thing to take care of is the backlog of unassessed articles (which, once I finish the script mentioned above, has the potential to become rather large quite rapidly); aside from that, it's really up to you.

Kirill Lokshin 01:31, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

• Partisans: I would suggest to not only reward the guy who helped to solve the issue, but all the members of the conflicting parties who were able to get(be brought) to a solution. This would be something like a veteran reward.
• Task forces: And some editors like me signed up in too many forces resulting in a low profile in some of them and as a result inflated numbers of participants.
• Assessment: A user called Kirill Lokshin tends to appear in every peer review, as long as he can reach a keyboard that issue is covered somehow, but could do better (Pocklington seems to like it either). Wandalstouring 01:52, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

More people in the peer reviews are always a good idea (particularly given that I usually can't comment on the content too well). Kirill Lokshin 02:38, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Since I'm not a AC anymore i'm not to sure to the validity of my posting here therfore I'll keep it to querry: About the awards mayhaps we shoudl attemtp a reviving the discusion? Or gear towards implementation should no one have any objections to the conclusions found?--Dryzen 16:16, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure we really came to any conclusion that would be easy to implement in practice; so if anyone feels like running with it, please feel free to start up a discussion again.

(And please feel free to post here even if you're no longer officially an AC; it's not like we're going to kick you out. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 16:25, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

What, this isn't a closed club? And I though there was going to be a doorman...Carom 16:37, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

He bribed our doormaid with his charms. Wandalstouring 17:46, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Lt. Cmdr.Commodore Wikipe-tan isn't immune to that sort of thing? ; ) Carom 18:04, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Nope and I'm the proof. ;oD--Dryzen 14:35, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Thats was I thought, anyone willing ot pour energy back into the discussion?--Dryzen 14:36, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm more than willing to revive this discussion, although I personally prefer this version of the tiered award system. However, I think I'll wait until the current discussion regarding the citation guidelines moves towards conclusion, as I don't want it to get lost in the shuffle again. Carom 15:16, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I've raised the award issue on the main page, please feel free to contribute to the discussion. Carom 06:34, 5 March 2007 (UTC)

Small change in the template

I thought about our last request for this Hammurabi map. Perhaps we should make clearer that the resources section helps to find images by renaming: 'Image and media resources' to 'Map, image and media resources'. OK? Wandalstouring 02:01, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Sounds alright to me. --Petercorless 02:29, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Yep, seems like a good idea. Kirill Lokshin 02:35, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Changed it to "Image, map, and media resources" in both places; I think the alphabetical ordering is neater, but we can use the other one if anyone feels strongly about it. Kirill Lokshin 02:43, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Deletion sorting list

I've just discovered that Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Military is apparently being updated now, so I've added a link to it to the navigation template. It could be quite useful, I suspect; we tend not to hear about AFDs dealing with our material, for the most part. Kirill Lokshin 04:21, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes they do then to forget to notify us till its late in the game, such as the Byzantine Infobox deletion...--Dryzen 16:17, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Idea

I was thinking and seeing as we have annoucements for peer reviews and A-class revuews at task forces why don't we have on for FACs and FARs. Kyriakos 12:54, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I'd considered it in the past, but I suspect that it would be seen as an attempt at vote-stacking on our part, which would be quite bad for our reputation in the community. Kirill Lokshin 12:57, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

citation guidelines with a section on possible styles

I suggest to expand our section on citation styles if the reference discussion is getting to a close. We do have lots of ideas by now how one can possiblyput refs and not everybodyis knowledgable about the possible styles. Explaining also some pro and contra of citation,what is ugly, how it affects the text, how it affects verifiability, how tomake clear what belongs to a note, etc. Wandalstouring 19:37, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I have no objection to putting together some purely stylistic recommendations on the available citation styles and how to structure the citations; but I don't think we need to—or should—try to justify the fundamental idea of citation and verifiability. That's properly the province of central policy (WP:ATT), and not something that individual WikiProjects really need to concern themselves with. Kirill Lokshin 21:18, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

No, I neither want to make any official policy,but the issue is raised here time by time, sowe can provide some guidance on what is possible and how project specific issues can be sourced (troop numbers, casualties, btw.) Wandalstouring 13:00, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Collaboration of the Fortnight

Seeing as our Collaboration of the Fortnight has now run for a year, I think it might be worthwhile to take a look at its performance. Frankly, it doesn't seem to be particularly successful; while a few of the articles have been significantly improved, the majority have experienced only superficial editing (and even in the cases where substantial improvements were made, those improvements seem to be primarily the work of one or two editors).

In some sense, this is precisely what one might expect with a project whose scope is so broad; most members edit primarily within some relatively narrow fields of interest. This becomes a problem, however, for attempts at directed collaboration; the average article selected will not be edited by anyone except the editors who have an interest in the topic a priori.

The question, then, is this: is the directed collaboration model (by which I mean selecting a single article and trying to get a large number of people to work on it simultaneously) actually feasible in practice? We don't appear to have any concrete results supporting it; the vast majority of our high-quality articles are primarily the work of individual members or small groups rather than large collections of editors. Is it more productive, then, to devote ourselves entirely to resource-based collaboration (that is, providing a central area where editors working on their own articles can obtain assistance, but not making any serious effort to push those editors towards particular articles)? Would it be better to obsolete the collaboration scheme, and perhaps replace it with something (e.g. the article-writing contest idea suggested by Kevin Myers) more compatible with how the project members actually edit in practice? Kirill Lokshin 04:07, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree that it is nearly impossible to get people to work outside a) their area of knowledge and b) their area of interest. It is not totally impossible, though. There are often people who can be incented to become interested in areas. For instance, I am not generally interested in U.S. Indian wars, but by golly I now know about the Battle of Cieneguilla. :) The question is how to get people interested in topics that might not be part of one's normal operating area. Part of that is making it a fun challenge. Contests are a great way to do it. --Petercorless 04:47, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I might suggest to do something like nominate three or four articles at a time in a similar "shape" (i.e., stubs or start-level, etc.) and then offer to provide an award to the teams capable of getting the articles bolstered to the greatest degree of neato by the end of a period. Or, perhaps, offering to give rewards to people for the "best x of the month." Something like that. We'd need a fair panel to judge, of course. --Petercorless 04:49, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Sounds nice, but what is the effect? Are people interested enough to overcome their narrowfieldedness by giving them the opportunity to gain some kind of reward for their front page? Wandalstouring 13:05, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

I like the competition idea. I think we should have editors nominate and stub or a start class artkcle which they want to improve and they have a ine month period to do so. At the end of the month we have a panel of judges look at which one has improved the most an the article with the majority of the votes wins and the editor receives a small reward. Kyriakos 13:17, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

You might be interested in taking a look at our Jumpaclass competition if you're thinking about competitions. Dev920 (Have a nice day!) 15:56, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, so it looks like there are three possible approaches here:

• A traditional competition: a contest is announced, editors select an article, the entries get judged at the end and a winner is declared.
• A rolling competitions: some variation on Dev920's idea, basically; editors sign up to make improvements and get points for articles moving up the assessment scale.
• A pre-selected competition: some variation on Petercorless's idea; a set of articles is selected and editors are challenged to improve them within a certain timeframe.

The third approach is closest to the current collaboration scheme; I suspect that it would suffer from the same overall problem of people not being able to work on articles that interest them and thus not participating. The second approach would be rather more informal and less infrastructure-intensive than the first; but it wouldn't be as prestige-building for the presumptive winners as a more traditional competition might be. I don't know to what extent that's something we want; we could, I suppose, do both, with a rolling competition accompanied by occasional formal contests.

Thoughts? Should we throw some/all of these ideas out to the project for debate? Kirill Lokshin 14:08, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Personally, I would prefer some form of the second idea, alhtough I think it might be a good idea to give awards to the "leaders" on some kind of regular basis - quarterly, perhaps? An additionaly, biannual competition organized along more traditional lines might not be a bad idea as well.

I guess the important thing is to gauge editor interest in any/all of these ideas, so the best thing might be to migrate this discussion over to the main talk page. Carom 19:21, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've started a discussion here. Kirill Lokshin 03:08, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Navigation box

Just in case anyone has strong opinions on how the navigation box should look but missed this discussion, please don't hesitate to drop by and add further comments. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 22:35, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

A-Class reviews

If anyone's bored and has a bit of free time, the A-Class review(s) could use a few regular participants. Thanks! :-) Kirill Lokshin 03:12, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

Status report for March 13

Well, it's been a little over three weeks since the last time we had one of these...

A number of thoughts, in no particular order:

1. Review department: The consolidated structure seems to be working more-or-less as expected; I haven't seen any complaints, in any case.
2. Requests migration: The sorting of the old list into the task force templates is nearly complete now; largely thanks to LordAmeth's efforts. There are about forty campaignboxes left to sort out, if anyone's feeling bored.
3. New articles: According to the Signpost, there's now the possibility of using AlexNewArtBot to automatically generate lists of new articles that are likely to be within a project's scope. Is this something we'd want to consider? Our listing of new articles seems fairly haphazard; I suspect that there are significantly more articles being created than what's being added by hand. (It would be interesting if this same approach could be applied to deletion listings as well, incidentally, as that's another area where we're not always aware of things.)
4. Article tagging: I've made some progress on a script to parse through a category tree and generate lists of untagged articles; hopefully I'll actually have something working well enough for practical use in the next week or so. We can then run through Category:Military and Category:War en masse and tighten up our tagging (which I suspect is missing a rather hefty number of articles at present). Ideally, the discussion of the project's scope will have more-or-less concluded by the time we start, so people will have a better picture of what should and shouldn't be tagged.
5. Infoboxes: I've been working with WP:SHIPS to try and get their infoboxes converted to our design style; if that works out, it'll get rid of one of the major areas of inconsistent styling in our articles. I've also made a start at some preliminary notes about needed infobox conversions; if anyone else knows of old infoboxes that we should be deprecating, please feel free to add them.

As usual, comments on these points—or anything else people would like to discuss—would be very appreciated! Kirill Lokshin 02:53, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

On the topic of new articles, I think that having a bot-generated list would be useful, and it will help us keep on top of tagging/assessing in the future. If a similar approach could be adopted for the deletion lists, that would also be good, but I'm not sure how much interest there is within the project for deletion debates.

As far as infoboxes, {{Infobox Castle}} and {{AFV}} are ready for conversion, correct?

Another point: do we have any procedure for converting really ugly (but possibly useful) templates into something more aesthetically pleasing? I cam across {{Black Brigade}} when I was implementing the new naming conventions, and, while I don't object to the template itself, it's really quite hideous (and difficult to read). I'm not suggesting any kind of guidelines of aesthetics or anything like that, but what do people here think about some degree of standardization? Carom 04:52, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

We tend not to have many deletion nominations in our scope, in any case; but it'd be nice if the ones that do occasionally pop up could be brought to our attention, I think, even if we don't really do anything with them.

I think those two infoboxes are ready, yes. As for the other templates: one obvious approach might be to apply the standard infobox styling to them (either explicitly or by having them use something like {{campaign}} as a framework). I don't think there's been any real attempt at standardization accross the board, although some areas (e.g. the various weaponry navigational templates) have had common designs develop over time. Kirill Lokshin 09:32, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Tagging articles sounds nice, but do we have a bit more overview of the tagged articles by specific task forces? - would be categorization. Wandalstouring 13:55, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you mean like WP:MHA#Task force statistics? Or something else? Kirill Lokshin 14:41, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

That is a nice list of the quality and number of articles tagged by a project, but without a possibility to easily find out which articles specifically belong to the task force/project. Wandalstouring 14:44, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

Hmm? I would have thought the linked categories were sufficient for that, at least for the task forces. (We don't, admittedly, have a single category for the entire project's articles, regardless of class. It'd be trivial to creat one, but I'm not sure how useful it would be, given that it would include 30,000+ articles at this point.) Kirill Lokshin 14:46, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

I've finished converting {{Infobox Castle}} (there were only about seven articles using it) - is this going to be deleted now, or are we going to keep it for historical purposes? {{AFV}} is a bigger job, but I've started on it - would it be possible to open this work up to the rest of the project (I'm sure there are some members who love mind-numbingly boring tasks)? Carom 01:38, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

We can probably put {{castle}} on TFD, once we clear things with WP:CASTLES. As far as opening the work up is concerned, that seems like a workable idea; the only reason I hadn't done so was because the page includes a number of conversions whose exact details haven't been worked out yet, and I didn't want people doing strange things with them. Kirill Lokshin 01:48, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, that all works for me; I'll keep plugging ahead with {{AFV}}. Carom 04:52, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, yes, the migration of requests. Forgot about that. Thanks for reminding me. I did a bit - far from "near complete" last I checked - but I'll take a look, get back into it. Thanks. LordAmeth 10:38, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

We may be talking about slightly different things here; I was referring to the migration of the old (non-templated) page being nearly complete, not the splitting out of the central (already templated) list of requested articles. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 15:36, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Ah, okay. Well, in any case, I did some more work on it today. It's coming along nicely :) LordAmeth 15:56, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Good job guys but are there any updates on moving forward re proposals for new task forces? The actual timing is appropriate as we are talking about new articles being created. -- FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up ®} 15:44, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

A lot of those have been sitting for a while now. To make things simple, I've created a plain old sign-up sheet for some of the more obvious ones; hopefully, we'll be able to tell which of those are viable in a more reasonable timeframe now.

I've created an initial ruleset for the bot to feed us new article announcements; we should see how it works sometime soon. :-) Kirill Lokshin 16:20, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

And apparently someone had already started this one (which is producing pretty bad results, in my opinion); hence, we'll probably have two listings showing up until we get this sorted out. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 19:02, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

WikiReaders?

What do people think about WikiReaders? (For anyone who doesn't know what the arcane jargon means, the essential idea is that WikiProjects could produce collections of articles for publication in various media; there are more details here.)

MILHIST seems to be well-suited towards this sort of thing; at the very least, we could presumably put together a collection of FA/A-Class articles as a selected reader in military history.

Obviously, this is in the very initial of planning stages right now, and there aren't any concrete plans at the moment; but does anyone object to pursuing this idea in principle? Kirill Lokshin 23:12, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

I fully support this idea. What, at this stage, can we do to help out? Carom 23:18, 19 March 2007 (UTC)

Aside from getting—and staying—involved with the overall discussion, I think there are three things we could (and probably should) do in the reasonably near future:

1. Undertake the needed discussions within the project to get this idea moving forward.
2. Set up the needed infrastructure to work on producing WikiReaders.
3. Attempt to compile the articles for one or more "demo" readers.

(Obviously, I think that getting involved in this early on will be highly beneficial, both because it will help to ensure that whatever system develops is suitable for our purposes, and because it will generate extra publicity for the project if/when this actually occurs.) Kirill Lokshin 00:47, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Could we think about a way to inform somebody about a subject he knows nothing about, for example many people in the northern hemisphere don't know very much about the military conflicts in New Zealand,but may possibly want to inform themselves. I suggest to think about including portals in a way like compact collections of works and to make access to themmore convenient for the 'reader'. Wandalstouring 09:02, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

It's not a bad idea in general, but probably through a different venue; portals themselves aren't really suitable for offline publication—at least in the traditional sense—because they use a lot of (a) dynamic content and (b) content that isn't useful to anyone that doesn't have access to the rest of Wikipedia.

(It does seem reasonable to say that portal topics could become potential WikiReader topics. Thus, if we have, say, a "Military of New Zealand" portal, we could use the articles selected for it to create a "Military of New Zealand" publication; but we wouldn't be publishing the portal itself, just the articles used on it.) Kirill Lokshin 12:37, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

We could make a kind of 'portal' in the printed version which works much like a book cover(possibly including the creation of such printable portal parts as an featured portal requirement). The bigger idea behind this suggestion is to encourage editors to provide not detailed breakdowns on small subjects, but rather develop a broad and informative coverage. The Portal:Military of ancient Rome and the {{RomanMilitary}} are examples for such an approach. Wandalstouring 14:26, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what you have in mind here; as far as I can tell, including that sort of navigational template in a printed version becomes somewhat pointless, as the links no longer work, but maybe I'm not thinking of the same thing you are. In any case, though, the specifics of how the publications are set up and what they contain can be worked out on a case-by-case basis once we start creating them; I suspect the needs of different types of WikiReaders will be rather different in this regard.

More to the point: I'm assuming that we're generally in favor of at least exploring this idea, and it can be put before the project at large now; is that the case? Kirill Lokshin 14:58, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Instead of direct links you can have page numbers and the like. Yes, I agree with you on the last point. Wandalstouring 19:44, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

I think this can go to a more general, project-wide, discussion. Carom 19:48, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've opened up a project-wide discussion at WT:MILHIST#Pursuing offline publication. Kirill Lokshin 02:22, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

A-Class reviews

Just a note: we seem to have a bunch of new A-Class reviews at the moment, so it'd be helpful if a few people could drop by and help out with any that don't get enough attention otherwise. Thanks! Kirill Lokshin 03:15, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Spring cleaning

We have a couple of pages in the project that have basically fallen out of use:

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Automation - has been devoid of any activity for months now; we're outsourcing much of the (remaining) bot work anyways.
• Wikipedia:Meetup/Military history - never really went anywhere.

Any thoughts on (or, more specifically, objections to) mothballing them? Kirill Lokshin 22:27, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

No objections here. Carom 23:10, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Feed them to the moths. Wandalstouring 08:57, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I've gone ahead and put archive tags on both of those. Kirill Lokshin 16:01, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

March newsletter

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Outreach/Newsletter March 2007; any comments before it gets sent out? Kirill Lokshin 18:09, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

OK Wandalstouring

Ok, I've asked Grafikm to send it out. Kirill Lokshin 23:29, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

Do you think having the header in "dark Khaki" and the body in "khaki" colours would be a good idea? -- FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up ®} 15:18, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

Those are a bit hard to read, I think (darkkhaki especially). If we're going to colorize it, I'd prefer the lightsteelblue/gray scheme used for the other project templates; but I'm not convinced that simply leaving it white isn't a neater approach. Kirill Lokshin 18:29, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

A-Class reviews (as usual)

As usual, if anyone is feeling bored, we have some new A-Class reviews that could use extra reviewers. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 21:48, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

New project award

Just a note for anyone that hasn't seen it yet: we now have a nomination for the new project award, so please drop by and comment on it. Thanks! :-) Kirill Lokshin 13:29, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

A-Class review needs attention

Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Operation Igloo White could use some (more) people commenting. ;-) Kirill Lokshin 00:47, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

And just a note that both this and the award nomination in the section above could use a few more people commenting. Kirill Lokshin 23:56, 1 April 2007 (UTC)