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Learning and Evaluation/Evaluation reports/2015/Writing Contests/Inputs

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Writing Contests


On this page, you will find answers to:
How many human hours are needed to run a contest?
What is the budget size for contests?
What donations are popular?


Budget

[edit]
Out of the 39 contests, 10 budgets were reported, where the average[1] budget reported was $701 USD, 6.5 staff hours, and 135 hours of volunteer time.

We asked program leaders to report their overall budgets, rather than their costs. Budgets were reported for 10 (26%) out of the 39 contests. Budgets ranged from $23 USD to $4,000 USD, and the average reported budget was $701 USD.[2] These data provide insight only into a few programs and more data would be needed to draw clearer conclusions around how budget influences outcomes.

"Classical Wikipedians will just go for a contest, even if the prize is cheap. They do it for the fun of it… When dealing with partners, with bigger contests, sometimes you get to new communities of their editors or volunteers, and sometimes these people appreciate the value of a fancy prize." User:Kippleboy, Catalan Wikipedia


“[The prize] is a substantial amount of money for someone living in this region... sometimes people ask us to buy them a laptop or something else that they need, and sometimes winners donate their prizes back to the pool. Giving them the choice about what to do with prize is much more of an incentive.”
User:Shipmaster
Producer Prize on Arabic Wikipedia

Hours

[edit]
From the six contests reporting staff or volunteer hours, 120 total hours were spent on the average contest.

Hours were reported for seven contests (18%), where six reported volunteer hours and four reports of staff hours. The range of staff hours was 0 to 40 hours, with an average of 6.5 hours.[3] The range of volunteer hours was 0 to 150 hours, with an average of 135.[4]

Donated resources

[edit]
Prizes and giveaways[5] were a common donated resource reported for nearly 93% of contests that reported donated resources. Meeting space was next most common, reported for 5 (42%) of 12 implementations.

Of 39 programs, 14 (36%) reported whether they had received any donated resources; of those, 13 (93%) reported receiving at least one type of donated resource[6]. Reported donated resources included: Prizes/Giveaways (93%), meeting spaces (42%), and donated food (18%).

“We have a lot of times where people donate their prizes back to the pool,
or just this year we had a judge make a substantial donation to the prize."
User:Shipmaster,
Producer Prize on Arabic Wikipedia




Use of donated resources.
The donated resources most often reported for writing contests were Prizes or Giveaways (93%)
  1. ↑ We present the median and ranges of metrics and use the term average to refer to the median average, since the median is a more statistically robust average than the arithmetic mean. To give a complete picture of the distribution of data, we include the means and standard deviations as references.
  2. ↑ Median= $701.00 USD, Mean= $1,322.40 USD, SD= $1,555.40 USD
  3. ↑ Median= 6.5 hours, Mean= 13.3 hours, SD= 18.3 hours
  4. ↑ Median= 135, Mean= 100, SD= 67.5
  5. ↑ A prize is typically an object , monetary or nonmonetary, given out to winners of a contest while a giveaway might be something to recognize participation.
  6. ↑ When mining for data, we could only indicate if an implementation had mentioned a donated resource. If a donated resource is not mentioned in the report, we could not assume the donated resource was not used.


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