Wikipedia:WikiProject Military History

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Military history WikiProject
Main project page + talk  → Discussion archives Style guide  → Essays Announcements and open tasks talk  → Articles needing attention  → Nominations for deletion talk  → New articles talk Assessment department talk  → A-Class FAQ / B-Class FAQ Contest department talk Logistics department talk  → Copy-editing alert box Outreach department talk  → Stress hotline talk Review department talk  → Improved! Review alert box Special projects department talk Showcase  → Featured picture gallery Portals talk
Project organization Coordinators + talk Members talk  → Active  → Inactive Awards talk Project banner talk Project category Project history
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Welcome to the Military history WikiProject on the English Wikipedia! We are a group dedicated to improving Wikipedia's coverage of topics related to military history. If you would like to join us, please feel free to add your name to the list of project members!

Goals

• To create the foremost reliable and accurate free-content encyclopedia of military history in the English language.
• To improve coverage of military history by creating, expanding, and maintaining articles that describe all of its aspects.
• To provide guidelines and recommendations for such articles, and to serve as the central point of discussion for issues related to military history in Wikipedia.

Scope

The project generally considers any article related to historical or contemporary warfare or military affairs to be within its scope. A more detailed description of the scope, and our primary focus areas within it, may be found in the section on project scope.

Structure

Internally, the project has developed several structural features to help in managing our extensive work:

• Coordinators, who are responsible for maintaining the administrative aspects of the project.
• Departments, which host work on several specialized tasks, including article quality assessment, writing contests, article logistics, and detailed reviews of articles and other content.
• Task forces, which are more informal groups for collaboration on specific topics within military history, such as particular nations, conflicts, or periods.

[edit] Scope

As noted above, the project generally considers any article related to historical or modern-day warfare or military affairs to be within its scope. (The American usage of "military" is applicable here; in other words, the project concerns itself with any armed forces rather than only with land armies.)

Our primary work is concentrated in a number of broad areas:

1. Military operations, battles, campaigns, and wars.
2. Military personnel, including both leaders and common soldiers, as well as other people involved in military affairs.

   Note that military service does not in and of itself place an individual within the scope of the project—particularly in the case of service in modern militaries. To qualify them, an individual's military service must have been somehow noteworthy or have contributed—directly or indirectly—to their notability.

3. Military units and formations, ranging from small units to entire national militaries.
4. Military equipment and technology, weapons, armour, and vehicles.
5. Military facilities and structures, such as fortifications, military bases, test sites, and military memorials.
6. Military historiography, publications, and historians.
7. Types and periods of warfare, the military histories of particular nations and groups, and general military science and doctrine.
8. Depictions of military history in all media, such as video games, painting, sculpture, music, film, poetry, and prose.

   Note that the project generally covers only those depictions for which a discussion of historical accuracy or real military influence is applicable. A distinction is therefore made between fictionalized depictions of historical warfare and purely invented depictions of fictional warfare; topics sufficiently divorced from actual history that a discussion of actual military history would no longer be relevant to them—such as futuristic warfare in Star Wars—are not considered to be within the project's scope. However, songs and music with long military associations—for example, It's a long way to Tipperary and Lili Marleen—are within the project's scope.

[edit] Announcements and open tasks

[edit] Style guide and essays

The project's style guide contains most of the editorial guidelines developed by the project. The guide covers the following areas:

1. Naming conventions
2. Notability
3. Article content
4. Usage and style
5. Sourcing and citation
6. Templates
7. Categories

All project members are encouraged to consult the relevant portions of the guide as they work on articles.

The project also maintains a collection of essays consisting of the advice and opinions of individual members of the project.

[edit] Project organization

[edit] Coordinators

The project coordinators are generally responsible for maintaining all of the procedural and administrative aspects of the project, and serve as the designated points-of-contact for procedural issues. They are not, however, endowed with any special executive powers, nor with any authority over article content or editor conduct.

The Lead Coordinator bears overall responsibility for coordinating the project; the other Coordinators aid the Lead Coordinator and focus on specific areas that require special attention.

The coordinators have adopted the following task forces to serve as the primary points of contact for administrative matters regarding them:

More detailed descriptions of the coordinators' responsibilities, the history of the positions, and the process by which coordinators are selected may also be of some interest.

[edit] Members

The full list of project members is located on a separate subpage; please feel free to add your name to it if you would like to join the project!

[edit] Departments

• The assessment department focuses on determining and tracking the quality of Wikipedia's military history articles; the resulting statistics are used to aid in recognizing excellent contributions and identifying topics in need of further work.
• The contest department aims to motivate increased quality in military history articles by offering a form of friendly competition for project members making improvements to them.
• The logistics department acts as a clearing house where editors' technical skills and resources can be matched to article needs, providing the specialist assistance editors may need to call upon to improve their articles.
• The outreach department acts as a central location for various member outreach work, including project newsletters, recruitment and welcoming banners, and other related initiatives.
• The review department conducts both informal peer reviews of articles and other content, as well as formal reviews for A-Class status; it also provides a centralized forum for viewing external reviews (such as featured article candidacies) within the project's scope.
• The special projects department focuses on specific ad-hoc high-priority tasks within the project and implements them by forming informal, short-term groups of editors for the purpose.

[edit] Task forces

Please discuss any proposals for new task forces with the project coordinators or with the project as a whole before creating them.

Task forces are informal groups of editors gathered for collaborative work on a particular topic within the field of military history; all project members are encouraged to participate in any that interest them.

[edit] Portals

There are a number of portals associated with this project: