Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/May 2011/Project news

Greetings from The Bugle, the Military history Project's official newsletter! Featured material this month includes Ian Rose's A-class medal with Swords (below), only the fourth person to be awarded the medal since it was introduced in January 2009, and Hawkeye's extremely interesting "Observations on the article writing process," based on his experiences in getting Albert Kesselring to featured article status. You can view it on the editorial page. Eleven articles in the project's scope became featured in the last month, along with fifteen to A-class. There were also six new featured sounds.

This month will see several exciting new developments in the Military history Project. to introduce the class ratings of C and FL ("featured lists"; see also WP:MHA) into our project template has been closed with a clear consensus to use both. While these have been widely used throughout Wikipedia (see WP:1.0/A), the implementation of C-class within Milhist has been extremely controversial over the years. It was rolled out by WP:1.0 in June 2008, but Milhist's members overwhelmingly rejected it soon after. Subsequent discussions, such as this, failed to result in a firm consensus for or against. A formal referendum on the issue was attached to the March 2009 coordinator election, but it also resulted in no consensus.

The topic appears to have been left alone for some time after that; the next major discussion we found was in late 2010, but that died due to lack of participation. Another discussion began in the strategy department in April of this year; adding FL to the template was suggested by Woody as a subsection to the topic. With the discussion virtually dead, coordinator emeritus Kirill Lokshin took the step of presenting a formal proposal on the project's main talk page, which resulted in a unanimous consensus for FL and a very strong consensus for C-Class. The code was to the project template by Kirill on 1 June. For C-class, it is an automated grade based on the output of the B-class checklist; the article must pass four of the five B-class parameters (B1 or B2, B3, B4, B5) to be awarded C. FL-class is awarded if the list passes a featured list candidacy.

There is also a proposal put forth by Kirill to reduce our project's infrastructure by closing the logistics and review departments. The helpful parts of the former would be absorbed by other departments, and the latter would simply be closed, with A-class assessments being run through the assessment department. A list of all Milhist reviews would still be maintained at Template:WPMILHIST Announcements.

That's the news for this month. In closing, we'd like to ask for feedback: since the newsletter's redesign in October 2010, the newsletter has settled into a consistent format, aside from widely varying publishing dates. We are always open to any idea that may improve it, so please leave comments on the news and editorials talk page at any time. Your editors, Cam (Chat)(Prof) and Ed [talk] [majestic titan]


 * The A-Class medal with Swords has been awarded to:
 * Ian Rose, for Valston Hancock, Alister Murdoch and Colin Hannah.
 * Parsecboy, for SMS Markgraf, List of armored cruisers of Germany and SMS Friedrich der Grosse (1911).
 * The A-Class medal with Oak Leaves has been awarded to:
 * Ian Rose, for Peter Jeffrey (RAAF officer), William Brill and John McCauley (RAAF officer).


 * The contest department has completed its forty-eighth month of competition. A total of 17 articles were entered by 5 editors. Ian Rose came first with 50 points from 6 articles, followed by Djmaschek with 30 points from 5 articles. They receive the WikiChevrons and the Writer's Barnstar respectively. Parsecboy, Oldwildbill and Cuprum17 also fielded entries. Please submit any articles you are working on for the June contest.