Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2010/Project news

Hello and welcome to the October 2010 edition of the Military history WikiProject newsletter! If you haven't noticed, we are trying a new design that will be less colorful and cluttered than the old. In another change, The Bugle now has two coordinators designated as editors: Climie.ca (Cam) and The ed17 (Ed). This was implemented to smooth what has become a complicated publishing process and avoid major delays in sending the newsletter out. If you have any comments, concerns, or ideas for future editions of The Bugle, or feedback on our new format (positive or negative), please leave them on the News and editorials talk page.

This month's Bugle is featuring the results of our project's first good article nominations backlog reduction contest (below), which was a major success, along with the familiar contest results and recently promoted articles. It also has an editorial honoring the fifth anniversary of our project's founding – the day WikiProject Wars and WikiProject Battles merged to become the single Military history WikiProject.

In other news, remember the project-wide goals instituted by the coordinators in August 2009? We are currently just fifteen featured articles away from reaching our first goal, 500 – assistance in this effort, whether it is through writing new articles or reviewing military history FACs, would be greatly appreciated.

In closing, The Bugle is always seeking new writers, especially for our editorials – please consider writing a piece for us! Your editors, Cam (Chat)(Prof) and Ed [talk] [majestic titan]

As anyone who's nominated an article for good article status knows, reviews can often take a good deal of time to happen. Those falling under our purview can take up to two months before someone reviews them against the good article criteria. Every so often, WikiProject Good articles decides to run a contest to reduce the backlog; we decided to run one for our own articles as well.

We are pleased to note that 107 articles were reviewed by nine editors during the contest. JonCatalán was the leading reviewer, with an amazing 42 reviews completed; Skinny87 came in second, with 29. Our thanks go out to these two and the other editors who participated. They obliterated our backlog and handily kept up with the flood of articles caused by the WikiCup.

In the future, we expect to run this contest at irregular intervals based on how large our backlog becomes. We hope that more editors will participate next time, and that editors will consider reviewing good article nominations whenever they get a chance. It's not hard and certainly helps out Wikipedia as a whole. Having an article judged as "good" by a peer is a great feeling, and we would like to see more editors submit articles for review and to review articles as well.

The project talk page is currently host to a debate about the wisdom of adopting a C-Class rating. WP:1.0 began using C-class in June 2008, but in a coordinator discussion (July 2008) and a referendum (March 2009) consensus was not to make use of the class within our project quality scale (currently any input of "C" in WPMILHIST will result in a Start-Class rating). Recent discussion at the strategy think tank has led the coordinators to raise the issue again. Further input is solicited and desired.