Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2024/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7

Welcome to 2024! As lead coordinator of WikiProject Military history, I am here to present a brief update on the state of the project in 2024. Membership is stable, as measured by the number of people receiving this newsletter. Our MilHistBot removes anybody who hasn't edited in the last 365 days, so it is pretty accurate. This is part of a wider trend whereby the decline of the number of editors on Wikipedia (a major area of concern a decade ago) has been arrested. However, there is still a decline in the number of highly engaged and active members. Fewer editors are doing more of the work.

This particularly affects our assessment and review processes. Nowadays the MilHistBot automatically assesses all new articles once the New page Patrol has categorised them as belonging to the project. Our A-class reviews are backlogged, although Good article nominations and Featured article candidates seem to have gotten on top of their backlogs for now. Featured and good topic candidates is moving to clean up theirs. Pitch in with a review if you can!

In 2022 there was a push to streamline the assessment process Wikipedia-wide. Our project has always been a strong supporter of the assessment process. I believe this is an important driver of quality, and the only guarantee that articles will be looked at, which helps filter out hoaxes. There has been a push to exclude the project from the common assessment, which has been resisted.

There is a list of the most popular articles in the project below. The project gets billions of page views each year. As always, these are dominated by recent events, television series and films. I personally avoid working on anything to do with present-day Eastern Europe, the Middle East or United States. These areas are too contentious for my taste. As it happens, this also covers the major ongoing wars (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, and the civil wars in Yemen, Syria and Sudan). If you do work on these pages, remember that:
 * History is not the same as news;
 * What you are seeing through your news sources, via the mainstream media and online, has been filtered and is not what other people are seeing - this is especially true of social media, which has been tuned to what the algorithms think are your personal preferences;
 * And that these areas are subject to ArbCom discretionary sanctions.

Best wishes for 2024!

Hawkeye7  (discuss)  23:11, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Compiled from WikiProject Military history/Popular pages