Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Academy/How can I help the project?

The Military History Project is one of the largest on Wikipedia. With over 150,000 articles, and a declining number of active editors, there is no shortage of ways to help the project as we endeavor to meet the goals set forth on our main project page:

• 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.

In his book, A Guide to Military History on the Internet, Simon Fowler wrote that Wikipedia's coverage of military history and its associated fields was among the best online. If we wish to retain this accolade, we constantly need editors to pitch in across the broad frontage that represents the project's area of operations.

One of the most basic ways in which editors can get involved is by adding reliably sourced content to our articles. There are, of course, many other ways in which you can help the project. These vary in their complexity from quite basic tasks to more advanced help.

Basic assistance

Even if you are not a part of the Military History Project per se, you can still be assistance to us at the most basic level: tagging and assessing. Wikipedia exists in "real time" so there is no stopping the constant influx of newly created articles, and those that fall within our scope, but are not labeled as such, are likely to be among the forgotten. Those who are into monitoring new pages or recent changes can add the {{milhist}} template to articles within our scope, and if you are looking for a way to help the project then you can sort through this information and add the appropriate assessment ranking and all applicable Milhist task forces.

Additionally, our assessment backlogs need constant tending to as they do pile up easily. If you are looking for an easy way to help the project you can assist with reducing the number of articles we have in the backlogs by assessing the unassessed articles, adding applicable task forces to those article in need of task force assignment, and helping us tackle the ever-growing number of articles that are lacking a completed B-class check list.

These simple tasks are among the most crucial, and paradoxically the most overlooked, within the project.

Intermediate assistance

If you would like to try your hand at something more challenging than simple tagging and assessment you can move up to article reviews. On any given day a number of articles within our scope come up for peer reviews, A-class review and re-appraisal, Good Article nominations, Good Article review, Featured Article candidates, Featured Article review, and Featured Article removal candidates; each of these articles requires productive feedback so as to advance to the next level or to identify issues that would prevent an article from moving up or cause an article to be demoted from its current rank.

Reviewing an article can be a time consuming task; your task will be to read the entire article and recommend improvements for the material, visual aids, citations and referencing, layout, and other factors that you feel need to be addressed either in an effort to bring the article up to the relevant standard. This entails familiarizing one's self with the basics of both the Manual of Style, the Military history Project Manual of Style, and the relevant assessment criteria so that you can identify matters of concern that an article will or may meet as it moves across the threshold to the higher assessment ranks.

This type of assistance is arguably the most important for the project, as we are always in need of people to check the articles that our members write to ensure that they conform to all current standards required. Without this assistance, editors – especially newcomers – must guess at what they will need to improve an article, and this in turn can cause our contributors to shy away from writing article since they were unable to receive effective feedback assistance from us.

If you do decide to help the project by looking at the articles up for review remember to be constructive and supportive, to offer suggestions for improvement, and to leave specific points of concern. Those who are asking for the review are typically those who have the most experience with the article in question, and as a result the person asking for a review may be reading from memory instead of reading what is actually written. Specificity helps those who asked for the review locate and fix problems with a greater degree of ease.

If article reviewing is not your preference, you may wish to look at the Military history articles needing attention and see if you can improve any of them so as to remove them from their respective attention categories. The nature of each of the attention request varies (for instance articles might require improvements in relation to referencing, structure, grammar, coverage or supporting materials), and while you may not be able to rectify all issues, some may be within your power to address. This will help an article progress towards meeting the B-class criteria, and will hopefully mean that it can be removed from the relevant attention category.

Advanced assistance

Those looking to assist the project in an advanced way can take a more active role in the project's review processes as well, but you may also wish to become more active in other areas. For instance, you may be able to help out in highly specific areas such as copy editing, image restoration/reviews, map making, checking for copy right violations or close paraphrasing, spot checking references, or providing assistance with translations. Additionally, you may have a large personal library, and you could offer to look up references for someone who may not have access to a source you possess.

If you decide that you would like to assist even more, then you may wish to consider standing for election as a coordinator for the project, which will allow you to take on the some of the other jobs that are necessary to keep the project running – closing reviews, welcoming new project members, answering calls for assistance from other editors over content disputes, etc. More information on what our coordinators do and the process by which one becomes a coordinator can be found on this academy page.