Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/Newsletter August 2009

The Military history WikiProject Newsletter Issue XLII (August 2009)
From the coordinators
  • The voting phase of the eighth coordinator elections, for the October–March term, started on 13 September and will run until 23:59 Sat 26 September.

    Each candidate garnering twenty or more endorsements will be appointed, to a maximum of fifteen. This election has a strong field of sixteen candidates running, offering many skills and representing all aspects of the project.

  • The Contest Department is going from strength to strength and drew a massive number of entries in August (see the results below). If you haven't fielded any entries yet, please think about doing so. It's great fun!  Roger Davies talk 14:02, 11 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Articles of note

New featured articles:

  1. Convoy GP55
  2. George Koval
  3. HMS Endeavour
  4. James Newland
  5. John Lerew
  6. Kaiser class battleship
  7. Keith Johnson (cricket administrator)
  8. König class battleship
  9. Siward, Earl of Northumbria
  10. Unification of Germany
  11. Victoria Cross for Australia

New featured lists:

  1. List of Second World War Victoria Cross recipients
  2. List of Victoria Cross recipients by campaign
  3. Marine Corps Brevet Medal
  4. Order of battle at the Battle of San Domingo

New featured pictures:

  1. "Students Going to Man the Fortifications"
  2. "Our New 'First Lord' at Sea"

New A-Class articles:

  1. 24th Infantry Division (United States)
  2. Bayern class battleship
  3. Derfflinger class battlecruiser
  4. Egmont Prinz zur Lippe-Weißenfeld
  5. Ellis Wackett
  6. No. 3 Commando
  7. Operation Pleshet
  8. SMS König
  9. SMS Hindenburg
Project news
  • People with an interest in clearly presenting battle information, and First World War buffs, will find the discussion about a new campaign box for the Battle of the Somme interesting.
  • With the recent increase in enthusiasm, Wikipedia-wide, for creating "outline" articles, there's an ongoing discussion here. The idea is to produce guidelines for overview articles for Milhist editors and reviewers.
  • Proposals have been made to introduce a new self-scoring "honour" system for Contest Department entries. Contributions, especially from regular nominees, are welcome.
Contest Department
Awards and honours
Editorial: Getting to FAC via A-Class - some interesting new facts
Well, it’s official. Milhist articles have a much better than average chance of success as featured article candidates. MBK004 has done some useful number-crunching following the fortunes of the 97 Milhist featured article candidates submitted between January and July this year. The research shows that 70% of Milhist articles were promoted against an overall average of 51%.

Looking behind the figures, some other interesting facts emerge. First, 84% of our promoted articles had successfully passed a Milhist A-Class Review before going on to FAC. Second, of the 29 Milhist articles that failed, less than half (41%) had had an A-Class Review. Third, the 97 Milhist articles accounted for 16% of all FACs submitted between January and July of this year.

The clear lesson is that if you want a string of featured articles to your credit, you may find Milhist's A-class Review process to be of benefit to you!  Roger Davies talk


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