User:Bye for now/sandbox2

At the moment, this is an essay and NOT an article. It is my own notes and guidance for Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Assessment/B-Class, based on my own opinions from my own limited experience. Because it is for my own guidance, I ask that no-one else edits it and the Talk page is used for comments/improvements/suggestions.

General

As a general principle, I would say that it is not a good idea to simply cut-and-paste bits from other articles, for all the criteria below, such as existing citations or citation-types.

An assessment of an article can be requested at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Assessment/Requests.

B1 Referencing and citation

• B1. "It is suitably referenced, and all major points have appropriate inline citations."
• From Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Assessment/B-Class_FAQ: Policy is to cite anything that is likely to be challenged but, again, this is B-Class not a FAC so some latitude is permitted. As a rule of thumb, the absolute minimum is that all paragraphs should at least end with a citation and and all direct quotes should be attributed to a source.
• See also: Wikipedia:WikiProject_Military_history/Academy/Citations_and_references.

According to Wikipedia:Tutorial/Citing sources something like is ok. But it does refer you on to: Wikipedia:Citation templates. If your eyes haven't glazed over by the time you get to Wikipedia:Citation_templates#Variations you might learn that "Wikipedia does not dictate a particular way to insert citations into an article. As a result, there are multiple ways to structure citations in an article; multiple ways to insert individual citations; and multiple ways to link short-form inline citations with the full-form citations in the bibliography, when using a style that calls for short-form citations." So: alles klar so far. Or maybe not.

Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Military_history#Citation_styles is a better guide to what MILHIST expects. Included in this section, it says that "The final choice of which style to follow is left to the discretion of an article's editors." What this may mean in practice, however, is that whether or not you've used the right method could depend on the assessor's discretion rather than yours. Which is fine if the assessor explains what method would be better. After all, the assessor probably has more experience than you. However, the only clue you may get is "Referencing and citation: criterion not met" on the assessment template. What this may mean could include any or all of the following (not an exhaustive list):

• You didn't use the right method for citations.

Recommended: use this method.

• You didn't provide enough citations (which could include using 3 or 4 references to generate an entire section and the assessor thinks each individual sentence needs to say which references generated it).
• You didn't provide a reference to a reliable-enough source.
• You wrote a statement that did not really match the source (misinterpretation, cherry-picking or whatever).
• You wrote a statement that exactly matched the source (copyvio).

As a novice editor, the choices include:

1. Contacting the user who made the assessment. Obviously, this requires putting aside any personal concerns of the possibilities of appearing to look stupid or of wasting someone's time.
2. Working it out for yourself by extensive research of WP procedures, looking at other B-class articles for comparisson or (possibly) just by trial and error.
3. Giving up.

Aerospace and defense news sites

• Aviation Week, Flight Global/Inter., Defense News, Air Force mag. & Daily Report, Defense Daily, AirForces Monthly news/Key Publishing