Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/October 2022/Op-ed


 * By Hawkeye7

I'm your new lead coordinator. I thought I might get the ball rolling by telling a bit about myself.

How did you become interested in Military History?

I was interested in history as a boy. I persuaded my parents to buy Purnell's History of the Second World War, a six-volume history of the Second World War (later increased to eight volumes) that came out in weekly parts in the late 1970s. I would read each issue from cover to cover. It had some pretty good articles in it, often written by key participants, so (for example) articles on the Western Desert campaign were written by Eric Dorman O'Gowan and Walther Nehring. Later I read through Charles Bean's Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and took a tour of the Australian battlefields in Turkey, France and Belgium. I decided to get a master's degree in military history. For a topic, my supervisor gave me a book on technology and the Canadian Corps in World War I. I took it away and read it that night. He then asked if I could produce an Australian version of it. I said that would be no problem, and he asked me to come back with a proposed structure for it. I produced a page with the chapters laid out and the topics to be covered in point form. I then wrote it up over the next two years for my master's thesis. Research at the Australian War Memorial was simplified because Bean had already sorted the documents into chronological and topical order. I then set my sights on earning a PhD, and for my topic switched to the less researched World War II, writing about logistics, which was even less popular. I knew I was breaking new ground because I had to get so many documents examined.

How did you become involved with the Wikipedia Military History Project?

I got an email asking for changes to an article of mine on Wikipedia. I didn't think I had written any, but there it was, lifted from one of my web pages. So I corrected it and created an account. A friend of mine was editing Wikipedia and encouraged me to edit. I started during the Christmas break in 2006, and I signed up for the military history project. There were fine editors working on World War I, so I concentrated on the less popular World War II. I spent a few years on articles on the Manhattan Project, then wrote up the British nuclear weapons program. Now I am back to World War II again. My method of working normally involves bringing an article up to featured, and in the process creating or improving a couple of smaller articles (usually biographies) to good status. I was elected as a coordinator in 2011, and served until 2016, and then again since 2018. But I've never been the lead coordinator before.


 * By Hog Farm

Hey y'all! I'm one of the returning coordinators. In the spirit of Hawkeye above, I thought I'd tell a little about myself as well.

How did you become interested in Military History?

I spent most of my childhood on a farm, and spent much of my spare time reading. My parents had a decades-old copy of Bruce Catton's American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War, which was one of my favorites, as well as some old copies of a few of the Battleground games. I guess the eventual interest in the American Civil War was natural, as one of my distant ancestors fought with Sterling Price at the Battle of the Hemp Bales and was eventually executed by Union authorities, besides the fact that parts of western Missouri not all that far from where I grew up never really recovered from the Sacking of Osceola and General Order No. 11. Starting with Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, I've been to a number of the publicly preserved Civil War sites in the US.

How did you become involved with the Wikipedia Military History Project?

I started editing back in 2019 as a bored college student, and just kinda stuck around. I really started actually writing content regularly during the COVID-19 pandemic when stuck at home. I formally joined the project in 2020, and was elected coordinator for the first time that year. I've since had the honor to be re-elected in 2021 and 2022. I still read a lot, so my general article writing process is to notice something in what I'm reading that catches my interest, write about it, and then often work on some related subjects (for instance, work on Thomas C. Hindman also lead to Battle of Van Buren and Real Estate Bank of Arkansas). Most of what I write about is related to the backwater Trans-Mississippi Theater of the American Civil War, so a lot of it is too obscure or sketchily documented to bring to higher levels of content assessment like FA (looking at you, Battle of Roan's Tan Yard and CSS Tuscarora), but I try to get what I've worked on into at least B-class shape.


 * By Schierbecker

How did you become interested in Military History?

My grandfather Capt. Harold "Bud" Schierbecker was a dentist in the 24th Infantry Division in Korea, where he was attached to the 6th Medium Tank Battalion. After the Battle of Unsan he became separated for a time and was assumed captured. He was later awarded a Bronze Star. My grandfather first started opening up about his experiences in the war around the time I started editing in late 2008 (when I was 14). I was particularly interested in learning more about the Patton tanks he served with and Wikipedia was a great place to learn about that history.

I used to edit Wikipedia every chance I got, often at the school library. The vice principal took some explaining to understand why I was looking up the Wiki entries for ARs and Kalashnikovs.


 * By 

Hi everyone, I figured if I contribute to this we'll have an example of every species of active coord you can have, so...

How did you become interested in Military History?

Breeding I guess. I'm an air force brat, my father flew with the RAAF during World War II and the Malayan Emergency (no, I'm not as old as that might suggest, actually the youngest of a brood spread over two decades so I'm in fact Gen X like Hawkeye). My grandfather was an engineer during World War I, and my great-grandfather a doctor who served as a medical officer in the British Army. My father dissuaded me from joining the military, figuring the fun had gone out of it by the time he retired, but in the end I sort of had the best of both worlds, spending a decade as a private contractor to the Australian Defence Force, primarily air force and navy. Among the fringe benefits of that role were observing a combined air force exercise in Darwin, Northern Territory, wrangling a flight on an F-111C simulator at RAAF Amberley, Queensland, and surviving a crash-dive on a Collins-class submarine simulator in Adelaide, South Australia.

How did you become involved with the Wikipedia Military History Project?

Oddly enough I discovered WP while searching for info on rock music, and my first articles were amateurish efforts on that subject (you might be surprised to learn that I created WP's articles on David Bowie's "All the Young Dudes", "Heroes" and "Ashes to Ashes", and Marianne Faithfull's Broken English). Then I happened to notice people had created stubs for the "father of the RAAF", Richard Williams, and the RAAF's first home-grown air chief marshal, Frederick Scherger. Researching Scherger, who I knew my father admired, led me to the fascinating story of the Morotai Mutiny, which became my first new military article on WP (and eventually my second featured article) and to Air Marshal George Jones, my first A-class article and first featured article. Well it just snowballed from there... By the time I threw my hat in the ring for the 2009 MilHist coord election I was fairly well known around the traps, and in 2014 I was elected lead coord. After I retired from regular MilHist coord work in 2019 to focus on my ongoing Bugle co-editorship and featured article coordination, the community was kind enough to elect me a coord emeritus in 2020.