Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-03-03/WikiProject elections

The February 2008 elections for coordinators of WikiProject Military history have concluded, with Roger Davies elected to a six-month term as Lead Coordinator, and eight others elected and re-elected to assistant coordinator positions.

Davies takes the role of Lead Coordinator from Kirill Lokshin, who served in the position continuously from its beginning in February 2006, and was elected to four terms as Lead Coordinator. Kirill Lokshin chose not to run for another term in these elections.

Davies, meanwhile, was first elected to the position of Assistant Coordinator in the August 2007 elections, finishing ninth, and receiving the last position available. However, Davies became well-known within the project when he played a major role in organizing the 2007 Tag & Assess Drive, which resulted in the evaluation of 69,000 articles, nearly half of which were subsequently tagged and assessed as military history-related.

Of the other seven incumbent Assistant Coordinators, four stood for re-election, and all four were re-elected: LordAmeth (re-elected to a fourth term), Kyriakos (re-elected to a third term), and TomStar81 and Eurocopter tigre (each re-elected to a second term). Wandalstouring, who was also elected as an Assistant Coordinator, previously served two terms as Assistant Coordinator, from August 2006 to August 2007, but did not seek re-election in the August 2007 elections.

Only three of the eight Assistant Coordinator positions were filled by new coordinators: Blnguyen, Nick Dowling, and Woody. Woody ran for the position of Coordinator in the August 2007 elections (as Woodym555), but finished one vote behind Davies for the final position.

Upon the retirement of Kirill Lokshin, project members discussed whether the position of a lead coordinator was necessary, with nine coordinators working together. Since its inception, the position of lead coordinator has been largely titular, with the lead coordinator developing and implementing consensus along with assistant coordinators. As part of the election, users were offered the choice of maintaining the status quo (option 2), having the lead coordinator work in more of a leadership role, delegating tasks to assistant coordinators (option 1), or eliminating the position of lead coordinator altogether, with nine equally important coordinators (option 3). Almost unanimously, project members chose option 2, maintaining the status quo, with Roger Davies as the titular lead coordinator.

The Military history WikiProject is one of the most active WikiProjects; among its many accomplishments are:

• 255 featured articles (making up more than 13% of the 1,918 articles currently featured)
• 12 featured lists
• 47 task forces
• 726 active members