Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/January 2024/Op-ed





State of the Wikiproject

This year's war: Israeli troops move into Gaza in Operation Swords of Iron, 2 November 2023
By Hawkeye7

Welcome to 2024! As lead coordinator of Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history, I am here to present a brief update on the state of the project in 2024. Membership is stable, as measured by the number of people receiving this newsletter. Our MilHistBot removes anybody who hasn't edited in the last 365 days, so it is pretty accurate. This is part of a wider trend whereby the decline of the number of editors on Wikipedia (a major area of concern a decade ago) has been arrested. However, there is still a decline in the number of highly engaged and active members. Fewer editors are doing more of the work.

This particularly affects our assessment and review processes. Nowadays the MilHistBot automatically assesses all new articles once the New page Patrol has categorised them as belonging to the project. Our A-class reviews are backlogged, although Wikipedia:Good article nominations#Warfare and Wikipedia:Featured article candidates seem to have gotten on top of their backlogs for now. Wikipedia:Featured and good topic candidates is moving to clean up theirs. Pitch in with a review if you can!

In 2022 there was a push to streamline the assessment process Wikipedia-wide. Our project has always been a strong supporter of the assessment process. I believe this is an important driver of quality, and the only guarantee that articles will be looked at, which helps filter out hoaxes. There has been a push to exclude the project from the common assessment, which has been resisted.

There is a list of the most popular articles in the project below. The project gets billions of page views each year. As always, these are dominated by recent events, television series and films. I personally avoid working on anything to do with present-day Eastern Europe, the Middle East or United States. These areas are too contentious for my taste. As it happens, this also covers the major ongoing wars (Russia-Ukraine, Israel-Gaza, and the civil wars in Yemen, Syria and Sudan). If you do work on these pages, remember that:

  • History is not the same as news;
  • What you are seeing through your news sources, via the mainstream media and online, has been filtered and is not what other people are seeing - this is especially true of social media, which has been tuned to what the algorithms think are your personal preferences;
  • And that these areas are subject to ArbCom discretionary sanctions.

Best wishes for 2024!

Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:11, 8 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]


Most popular Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history pages for 2023

Compiled from Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Popular pages

Rank Page title Views Daily average Assessment
1 Cleopatra 64,802,427 177,540.90 FA
2 J. Robert Oppenheimer 28,655,073 78,507.05 FA
3 2023 Israel–Hamas war 13,278,290 36,378.88 B
4 Charles III 11,978,605 32,818.10 B
5 Napoleon 10,893,577 29,845.42 A
6 Russian invasion of Ukraine 10,714,991 29,356.14 B
7 Hamas 10,237,965 28,049.22 B
8 World War II 9,993,443 27,379.30 GA
9 Adolf Hitler 9,386,175 25,715.55 GA
10 Jimmy Carter 9,245,138 25,329.15 GA
11 Wagner Group 9,132,718 25,021.15 B
12 World War I 8,546,037 23,413.80 B
13 George III 8,522,472 23,349.24 FA
14 Queen Victoria 8,278,258 22,680.16 FA
15 Henry Kissinger 7,698,296 21,091.22 C
16 Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 7,399,664 20,273.05 C
17 Israeli–Palestinian conflict 7,097,313 19,444.69 C
18 John F. Kennedy 7,056,475 19,332.81 C
19 September 11 attacks 6,928,805 18,983.03 GA
20 Yevgeny Prigozhin 6,468,163 17,720.99 C
21 Russo-Ukrainian War 6,374,952 17,465.62 C
22 Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 6,279,815 17,204.97 A
23 George VI 6,128,621 16,790.74 FA
24 Ottoman Empire 5,818,326 15,940.62 B
25 William, Prince of Wales 5,579,498 15,286.30 B
26 Henry VIII 5,303,107 14,529.06 GA
27 Edward VIII 5,085,766 13,933.61 FA
28 Top Gun: Maverick 5,081,480 13,921.86 C
29 Vietnam War 5,033,527 13,790.48 C
30 Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex 5,005,614 13,714.01 B
31 Muhammad 4,932,556 13,513.85 GA
32 Abraham Lincoln 4,861,054 13,317.96 GA
33 Franklin D. Roosevelt 4,831,035 13,235.71 GA
34 Lewis Strauss 4,813,237 13,186.95 GA
35 Alexander the Great 4,705,451 12,891.65 GA
36 American Civil War 4,664,253 12,778.78 B
37 Ronald Reagan 4,628,240 12,680.11 FA
38 Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II 4,616,785 12,648.73 GA
39 Joseph Stalin 4,533,271 12,419.92 GA
40 Winston Churchill 4,523,925 12,394.32 GA
41 Roman Empire 4,415,523 12,097.32 GA
42 George W. Bush 4,333,299 11,872.05 GA
43 NATO 4,284,117 11,737.31 GA
44 Bill Clinton 4,110,641 11,262.03 GA
45 Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh 4,012,788 10,993.94 B
46 Julius Caesar 3,967,368 10,869.50 B
47 Nazi Germany 3,928,767 10,763.75 GA
48 Genghis Khan 3,834,788 10,506.27 B
49 Casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian War 3,734,454 10,231.38 C
50 George Washington 3,733,582 10,228.99 GA
51 The Holocaust 3,724,269 10,203.48 B
52 Manhattan Project 3,704,496 10,149.30 FA
53 Saddam Hussein 3,663,824 10,037.87 B
54 Nelson Mandela 3,605,897 9,879.17 FA
55 George H. W. Bush 3,599,560 9,861.81 C
56 Richard Nixon 3,586,772 9,826.77 FA
57 Theodore Roosevelt 3,558,194 9,748.48 C
58 William IV 3,467,544 9,500.12 FA
59 Korean War 3,448,166 9,447.03 B
60 Osama bin Laden 3,446,977 9,443.77 B
61 Unit 731 3,436,868 9,416.08 B
62 General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcon 3,435,672 9,412.80 GA
63 Michael Caine 3,407,887 9,336.68 C
64 Dwight D. Eisenhower 3,365,863 9,221.54 B
65 Yom Kippur War 3,314,530 9,080.90 C
66 Six-Day War 3,251,584 8,908.45 C
67 Volodymyr Zelenskyy 3,202,998 8,775.34 C
68 Islamic State 3,189,269 8,737.72 B
69 Attack on Pearl Harbor 3,183,877 8,722.95 C
70 Indira Gandhi 3,174,549 8,697.39 C
71 Che Guevara 3,157,026 8,649.39 GA
72 Tom Selleck 3,144,895 8,616.15 C
73 M1 Abrams 3,108,080 8,515.29 C
74 Byzantine Empire 3,037,621 8,322.25 FA
75 Gulf War 3,035,835 8,317.36 C
76 Vlad the Impaler 3,032,358 8,307.83 C
77 Lyndon B. Johnson 2,980,165 8,164.84 B
78 Marie Curie 2,969,493 8,135.60 GA
79 Benito Mussolini 2,959,651 8,108.63 B
80 Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor 2,955,031 8,095.98 GA
81 Mary, Queen of Scots 2,943,345 8,063.96 FA
82 Augustus 2,915,013 7,986.34 FA
83 Harry S. Truman 2,888,216 7,912.92 FA
84 Mao Zedong 2,823,190 7,734.77 C
85 Margaret Thatcher 2,795,775 7,659.66 GA
86 Gerald Ford 2,756,978 7,553.36 C
87 Roald Dahl 2,736,437 7,497.09 B
88 Mary I of England 2,734,969 7,493.07 GA
89 NATO phonetic alphabet 2,680,803 7,344.67 C
90 Chris Kyle 2,634,141 7,216.82 C
91 David Goggins 2,624,672 7,190.88 C
92 Band of Brothers (miniseries) 2,620,925 7,180.62 B
93 Charles I of England 2,575,935 7,057.36 FA
94 Christopher Lee 2,573,116 7,049.63 GA
95 Cold War 2,559,155 7,011.38 C
96 Vladimir Lenin 2,556,051 7,002.88 FA
97 French Revolution 2,551,495 6,990.40 B
98 Kim Jong Un 2,547,634 6,979.82 B
99 Hezbollah 2,544,356 6,970.84 GA
100 Leopard 2 2,530,533 6,932.97 C


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+ Add a commentDiscuss this story
  • Well said, Hawkeye. Some great info and guidance there. Cheers, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 22:00, 10 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Those pageviews reported by the bot are off. 🤔 Cleopatra's Wikipedia popularity is a long time false positive, at least in part due to this. I'm also not sure where the bot is getting its pageview count from for the Israel–Hamas War... it's actually around 13 million. Oppenheimer is above 28 million. Sam Bahadur is at 2 million views, not nearly 19. Ed [talk] [OMT] 22:42, 11 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    The Bot added up the pages as reported on Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Popular pages. For 2023 Israel–Hamas war, Popular pages gave it 2,043,849 views in December, 3,123,611 in November and 8,110,830 in October. I have corrected an error; I think the figures line up better now. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 01:21, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Thanks, Hawkeye! If I'm understanding that correctly, apologies for the direct language as I didn't know it was your bot that did the calculating. I assumed it was something off with the Community tech bot's updates. Ed [talk] [OMT] 05:16, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    No apology necessary. There was an error in the Bot's calculations caused by a software change external to the bots. I have corrected it. I should have checked more carefully but was in a hurry to make the Bugle issue. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 06:53, 12 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]