Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2012/Project news

Welcome to the July 2012 edition of the Bugle! In this month's edition, we bring you the typical awards, article news, and book reviews that you normally see, plus a note on special projects (bottom of this page) and a piece on what one editor learned from a workshop with military historians in Australia (see this week's op-ed).

In news this month, Wikimania 2012 was held in the capital of the United States (Washington, D.C.). During the conference, several people involved with our project gathered for dinner and to discuss the project as a whole. While I cannot remember all of the usernames of the attendees (feel free to add yourself!), Dank, Rjensen, Marcus Qwertyus, Kumioko, Parsecboy, Foxj, HJ Mitchell, and The ed17 (me) all came. Great fun was had by all, and I hope that it happens again.

Relevant to the project as a whole was a talk given by Erik Möller, who is the Deputy Director and VP of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation, entitled 'The Purpose-driven Social Network: Supporting WikiProjects with Technology'. In short, he proposed a whole new role for WikiProjects in the Wikipedia system, where new editors would be directed to projects based on their interests. This is far from being close to implementation; it would only come with the Athena Project (see the Signpost op-ed on 6 August 2012 for more). However, the area where we can improve is in aesthetics&mdash;much of Möller's talk was also devoted to the problematic design of WikiProject pages, with walls of text and barely-visible 'join' buttons contributing to slow or non-existent growth. Limited discussion on this was held on the project talk page but died quickly (see the archives; more discussion and action on this is necessary.

The Bugle will link you to the video of the presentation in next month's issue, as they have not been uploaded at present; at the moment, the slides of Möller's presentation are located at wm2012:File:Wikimania 2012-WikiProjects.pdf. In addition, keep an eye out for a second Signpost Wikimania article by me (Ed), which will focus on some of the sessions, including this presentation, and link to the uploaded videos.

Your editors, Ian Rose (talk) and Ed [talk] [majestic titan]


 * The A-Class medal has been awarded to:
 * Benea for HMS Speedy (1782), HMS Temeraire (1798) and HMS Bellerophon (1786).


 * The contest department completed its 61st round of competition last month. A total of 36 articles were submitted by 7 editors. Parsecboy came first with 68 points from 10 entries, followed by Ian Rose with 38 points from 5 entries. They receive the Chevrons and the Writer's Barnstar, respectively. Honourable mentions go to Sturmvogel 66 and Zawed, with 35 and 31 points respectively. Djmaschek, RoslynSKP and Thurgate also fielded entries. Please submit any articles you are working on for this month's contest now.


 * The special project to repair and improve articles on national militaries commenced in late June, and is scheduled to run until 31 August. As at 22 July, 24 articles had been repaired, with significant levels of vandalism being removed from some of them.