Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/A-Class review/Instructions

Instructions

Requesting a review

To request the first A-Class review of an article:

1. Please double-check the MILHIST A-class criteria and ensure that the article meets most or all of the five (a good way of ensuring this is to put the article through a good article nomination or a peer review beforehand, although this is not mandatory).
2. If there has been a previous A-Class nomination of the article, before re-nominating the article the old nomination page must be moved to Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Name of nominated article/archive1 to make way for the new nomination page.
3. Add A-Class=current to the {{WPMILHIST}} project banner at the top of the article's talk page (e.g. immediately after the class= or list= field).
4. From there, click on the "currently undergoing" link that appears in the template (below the "Additional information" section header). This will open a page pre-formatted for the discussion of the status of the article.
5. List your reason for nominating the article in the appropriate place, and save the page.
6. Add {{Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Name of nominated article}} at the top of the list of A-Class review requests below.
7. Refresh the article's talk page's cache by following these steps. (This is so that the article's talk page "knows" that the A-class review page has actually been created. It can also be accomplished in the 2010 wikitext editor by opening the page in edit mode and then clicking "save" without changing anything, i.e. making a "null edit". )
8. Consider reviewing another nominated article (or several) to help with any backlog (note: this is not mandatory, but the process does not work unless people are prepared to review. A good rule of thumb is that each nominator should try to review at least three other nominations as that is, in effect, what each nominator is asking for themselves. This should not be construed to imply QPQ).

Restrictions

1. An article may be nominated a second (or third, and so forth) time, either because it failed a prior nomination or because it was demoted and is now ready for re-appraisal. There is no limit on how quickly renominations of failed articles may be made; it is perfectly acceptable to renominate as soon as the outstanding objections from the previous nomination have been satisfied.
2. There are no formal limits to how many articles a single editor can nominate at any one time; however, editors are encouraged to be mindful not to overwhelm the system. A general rule of thumb is no more than three articles per nominator at one time, although it is not a hard-and-fast rule and editors should use their judgement in this regard.
3. An article may not be nominated for an A-Class review and be a Featured article candidate, undergoing a Peer Review, or have a Good article nomination at the same time.

Commenting

The Milhist A-Class standard is deliberately set high, very close to featured article quality. Reviewers should therefore satisfy themselves that the article meets all of the A-Class criteria before supporting a nomination. If needed, a FAQ page is available. As with featured articles, any objections must be "actionable"; that is, capable of rectification.

If you are intending to review an article but not yet ready to post your comments, it is suggested that you add a placeholder comment. This lets other editors know that a review is in progress. This could be done by creating a comment or header such as "Reviewing by Username" followed by your signature. This would be added below the last text on the review page. When you are ready to add comments to the review, strike out the placeholder comment and add your review. For instance, strike out "reviewing" and replace it with "comments" eg:

Comments Reviewing by Username

Add your comments after the heading you have created. Once comments have been addressed by the nominator you may choose to support or oppose the nomination's promotion to A-class by changing the heading:

Support / Oppose Comments reviewing by Username

If you wish to abstain from either decision, you may indicate that your comments have been addressed or not addressed. For instance:

Comments Reviewing by Username addressed / not addressed

This makes it easy for the nominator and closer to identify the status of your review. You may also wish to add a closing statement at the end of your comments. When a nominator addresses a comment, this can be marked as {{done}} or {{resolved}}, or in some other way. This makes it easy to keep track of progress, although it is not mandatory.

Requesting a review to be closed

A nominator may request the review be closed at any time if they wish to withdraw it. This can be done by listing the review at ACRs for closure, or by pinging an uninvolved co-ord. For a review to be closed successfully, however, please ensure that it has been open a minimum of five days, that all reviewers have finalised their reviews and that the review has a minimum of at least three supports, a source review and an image review. The source review should focus on whether the sources used in the article are reliable and of high quality, and in the case of a first-time nominator, spot-checking should also be conducted to confirm that the citations support the content. Once you believe you have addressed any review comments, you may need to contact some of the reviewers to confirm if you have satisfied their concerns.

After A-Class

You may wish to consider taking your article to featured article candidates for review. Before doing so, make sure you have addressed any suggestions that might have been made during the A-class review, that were not considered mandatory for promotion to A-class. It can pay to ask the A-class reviewers to help prepare your article, or you may consider sending it to peer review or to the Guild of Copy Editors for a final copy edit.

Demotion

If an editor feels that any current A-class article no longer meet the standards and may thus need to be considered for demotion (i.e. it needs a re-appraisal) please leave a message for the project coordinators, who will be happy to help.