Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2025/Op-ed

State of the Wikiproject

By Hawkeye7

US Navy Lieutenant Brandley Sinoc, right, Port Operations officer, briefs U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Steven J. Bleymaier, director of logistics, engineering and force protection, Headquarters Air Mobility Command, on how seaport infrastructure impacts operations and other tenant commands on Joint Base Charleston

Welcome to 2025! As lead coordinator of Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history, I am here to present a brief update on the state of the project in 2025. This year I got to attend Wikimania 2024 in Katowice, Poland. It was great seeing a lot of you in person!! A lot of the sessions and discussion was about Artificial Intelligence. I am of two minds about this myself: on the one hand, it has progressed further and faster than I expected; on the other, it still looks like the latest fad. There's already a lot of people who think that it can replace human Wikipedia editors, who after after all are just aggregating information manually.

In an interview titled "The Depths of Wikipedians", Annie Rauwerda, an American internet influencer responsible for Depths of Wikipedia, said:

There's the military history WikiProject. Maybe this makes sense because of the whole military thing, but they are very hierarchical. They have a lot of rules. They're very efficient in reviewing articles. Also Wikipedia has a pretty outdated rating system for articles — one of which just got deprecated when "Featured Articles" and "Good Articles" became a thing — except for in military history, because that community was like, well, we need to have every level.

Historians will know that her comment is counter-factual: our Wikipedia rating system came out of Wikipedia talk:Content assessment and was adopted by most projects, including our own. It was created to address the failings of the existing Featured and Good Article processes, not the other way around. She did acknowledge that Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history and Wikipedia:WikiProject Tropical cyclones are Wikipedia's strongest suits, but the quality of our articles is is not an accident but the result of our hard work and commitment to peer review. That defining process is in trouble.

As Hog Farm noted:

The robust A-Class has been a calling card of our WikiProject for years, and is a big part of why our project has historically been a leader in producing high-quality content.

There have been calls for our A-Class review process, in which an article is reviewed by three experts, to be extended to other projects. Regrettably, our process is faltering. In 2024, we promoted 23 A-Class articles, compared with 33 in 2023, 48 in 2022, 61 in 2021 and 84 in 2020. This represents a long-term downward trend. Part of the responsibility for the low number in 2024 is mine; in the change to the new project template, the pre-filling was lost, making it harder to create a nomination. This has now been rectified, and the project template is working again.

The most important factor, though, has been death of reviews. Moreover, more of the reviews we do have been coming from the usual suspects. This is untenable. This has caused the time it takes for an article to get through A-Class to blow out until it is nearly as bad as Featured article candidates (FAC). In turn, editors like myself have been discouraged from nominating. Annie Rauwerda has scant knowledge of the military or our military history project. If we really were run on a hierarchical basis, there would be no need for volunteering; I could simply hand out reviewing assignments. But, needless to say, our project does not work that way.

So in 2025, let's all make a New Year's resolution to contribute to our review processes! The New Pages Patrol and Good Articles are running much-needed backlog drives in January, and our A-class nominations can always use reviewers.

Notes

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