Learning and Evaluation/Archive/Share Space/Contests

This page is for sharing image upload competitions such as on-wiki writing/image contests. Please post questions and comments on the talk page about each other's activities. Not a part of this group? No problem, just use the templates below to add your program experience to the bottom.

Team Program Leaders

WikiCup (German WP)

The WikiCup

Contestant Frank Schulenburg with first T-shirt

The WikiCup is a writing contest in the English and German Wikipedia as a championship that has taken place every year. The cup is played and won by skill of editing. The purpose of the cup is to encourage content improvement and make editing on Wikipedia more fun. First installed in the English Wikipedia in 2007 I followed with this idea in 2012 the first time and got several authors as participants. In that year 57 participants started he competition that took place in four rounds; Alltogether they got points for 6,374 new created articles and countless of aditions to existing articles. 35 articles were elected as featured and 31 as good articles what means that about 23% of all featured articles and 13% of all good articles were created in the Cup. 84 articles were presented at the mainpage in our "Did you know" section (which in the German WP is only for new articles) and also ~ 250 quality pictures were elected from Cup players in 2012.

Resources used

• hundreds of volunteer hours
• 57 volunteers at the beginning
• no budget
• a t-shirt from Wikimedia Austria for all participants / round

Programming activities

Easy to explain: We started with a note in our Kurier (some kind of signpost) and talked about the Cup - then we started and it worked. After teh rounds we built the new teams for the next round.

Participants

57 participants from the authors community - not known is the number of male/female or other statistics.

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Goals of the program

• as much fun as can be
• as many new articles as the team is able to produce with a minimum quality (via kB)
• as many featured content as possible

Any program evaluation strategy used?

No - only some discussions on outcomes and some articles on the progress

Any program results or highlights you were able to measure?

• Number of envolved authors: 57 at the beginning
• Number of new articles: 6,374
• Number of featured articles: 35, 23% of all featured articles in 2012
• Number of good articles: 31, 13% of all goodarticles in 2012
• Number of DYK articles: 84
• Number of quality pictures: ~ 250
• Number of T-shirts produced: ask Denis ;)

Are there any program results that you would like to measure?

Not really

Is there anything else you would like to share?

In 2013 the WikiCup started again - with slightly modified rules to concentrate more on quality than on number of new articles. Results will be there at the end of this year - at the moment it's round 2 and I am No. 3 of all ;)

1) French Autumn contest

On awards ceremony, end of 2011

French Autumn was a first Wikipedia article writing contest organized by Wikimedia Ukraine and the first one in Ukrainian Wikipedia. Subsequently, we organized three more contests which shared the same design.

The goal of the French Autumn was to "develop articles about France in Ukrainian Wikipedia, and develop articles about Ukraine in French Wikipedia". The contest lasted for seven weeks.

The contest design features:

• really easy to participate even for novices (just add a contest template to an article's talk page)
• two-pass articles evaluation:
  • pre-evaluation after each week of the contest (this helps novices to understand what are the quality requirements in Wikipedia)
  • final evaluation
• two jury boards:
  • small jury – consisting of experienced wikipedians, who facilitate two-pass articles evaluation
  • big jury – consisting of respected francophones and people, who know the topic of the contest very well
• weekly small prizes (books, DVDs), big final prizes
• maximum objectivity and possibility to contribute to Wikipedia in different styles (like writing many mid-size articles or few big articles).
• experienced wikipedians did not have big advantage in the contest, since the articles' formatting was not taken into account that much
• it doesn't change the way of usual "Wikipedia life" in any way (for example, there's no prohibition for non-contestants to edit contest articles)
• possibility to create new articles or append existing stubs.

How a winner is determined?

• The winners are determined based on points they earn.
• Number of points for each article is proportional to (QUALITY ASSESSMENT) * (BYTES ADDED TO THE ARTICLE).
• Quality assessment is a value from 1 to 5 determined by jury. (It can be also 0, when the article clearly doesn't meet basic requirements.)

This formula proves to determine winners who deserve it the most and to achieve a reasonable balance between subjective and objective factors.

Resources used

• €2000 grant from Wikimedia France
  • 2/3 for prizes
  • 1/6 for advertising
  • 1/6 for organizing (particularly small gifts for the small jury members)
• Hundreds of volunteer hours (mainly from six members of the small jury)

Programming activities

• Designed the original rules.
• Created a bot for automatic compilation of lists of participating articles – this was necessary as contestants' points depend on article sizes.
• Ordered an online and offline (in a popular magazine) advertising of the event from a media partner (it cost us 50% of the usual price).
• Put advertising of the event in universities.
• Created a registration page for contest participants, what helped us to be in touch with all the participants through e-mail. (Though this practice was abandoned in two last contests, this helped us to understand how participants behave and understand the rules.)
• Gathered a small jury of experiences wikipedians
• Gathered a big jury of respected francophones and people, who know the topic of the contest very well
• A lot of reading and evaluating articles' quality (as part of small jury)
• Managing small and big jury.
• Buying prizes and making diplomas.
• Organizing an awards ceremony (in a popular book store in Kyiv).

Participants

• About 100 participants from all over Ukraine.
• Many novices.

Goals of the program

• Expand the French topic in Ukrainian Wikipedia
• Expand the Ukrainian topic in French Wikipedia
• Popularize Wikipedia (particularly among people, who'd never though to write it for free)
• Gather some quality content for Wikipedia

Any program evaluation strategy used?

The main measure is the amount of quality content contributed to Wikipedia and its cost: (amount of quality content) / (volunteer time + funds).

Any program results or highlights you were able to measure?

• About 8 Mb of wikitext were generated by participants.
• Every €250 оf initial funds brought about 1 Mb of wikitext.
• 550 articles in Ukrainian Wikipedia (475 of them bigger than 5 Kb).
• 142 articles in French Wikipedia.
• 8 articles received "Good" status.
• 750 people registered for the event and received basic Wikipedia editing instructions on e-mail.
• About half of all prizes were won by novice editors.

Are there any program results that you would like to measure?

• "See who has edited after the contest"

  – it seems that novice winners of article writing contests don't stay in Wikipedia for long. It's interesting to find out whether this is also true for non-winners (novice and experienced).

Is there anything else you would like to share?

• Many of experienced wikipedians seem to avoid this kind of contests. There's a quite common feeling among them that the intense competitive atmosphere for real prizes is not pleasant and even disturbing.
  At the same time, these contests seem to motivate users, who are "lazy" to contribute much without prizes.
• Therefore in future we may abandon this contest's model if we see that some other contest design generates more quality content with same resources. (One article writing contest of another model is being implemented by Wikimedia Ukraine at the time.)
• Probably a model of a contest in which "every article can win" would gather much more participants than what we have in this type of contests, and would motivate users to write only high quality articles.

A) British Museum Featured Article prize (2010)

Resources used

• BM prizes - £500 in vouchers; real cost maybe £200
• Relatively small amount of organizing, publicizing and judging time
• Some curator timing answering queries
• Entrants time

Programming activities

See the page - as part of the Wikipedian in residence programme, the British Museum agreed to offer 5 x £100 in prizes from their shop for new Featured Articles on topics related to the British Museum in any Wikipedia language edition. Ideally, the topics were articles about collection items. The rules were simple - the first 5 articles to reach FA got prizes, if considered relevant.

Promoted the event through WP pages and mailing lists.

Participants

It's not entirely clear how many participated as there was no actual entry process; winners just claimed the prizes. Certainly more efforts were under way than the 5 winners. Some other articles later becames FAs also - eg Lindow Man. The contest was effectively only realistically entered by experienced Wikipedians, or at least one on a team was needed.

Goals of the program

• Improve BM coverage in articles
• Generate interest in BM wikiproject

Any program evaluation strategy used?

No.

Any program results or highlights you were able to measure?

Only subjectively - it was thought a success.

Are there any program results that you would like to measure?

Next time it would be good to know how many people were attempting to win - just by an expression of interest like the Core Contest does.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

With hindsight the "open to all languages" was slightly unfair as not all languages have FAs, and the standard expected is not even.

B) The Core Contest - en:wp

Resources used

• Prizes of USD170 to GBP250 in total per contest
• Some organizer time, & a good deal of judging time

Programming activities

Publicized mainly just on-wiki (not always that well) on pages like Featured Articles Candidates

Participants

Effectively limited to experienced Wikipedians.

Goals of the program

Improve core articles, lossely defined.

Any program results or highlights you were able to measure?

The entries are all listed. The main aim of improvement can only be subjectively measured.

Are there any program results that you would like to measure?

Hmm. One might count long-term increase in views to the articles (all of which existed before) but essentially the improvement is somewhat subjective & reader benefits hard to quantify. One can count increases in article size in bytes, extra references etc, and many contestants give this information when submitting entries, but often what is removed is as important as what is added.

Any program evaluation strategy used?

No, though I think most people aware of it think the contests are sucesses, with good results for low input.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

A great idea I think - easy to run, & pretty productive, on subjective measures.

Your program title (i.e. WikiCup, Classical Music Challenge, Wikipedians to the Games)

Please do your best to be as detailed, yet to the point, as possible when describing your program. Feel free to add images from the program as well!

Resources used

Explanation: In this section, in a bullet point list (*), please list the resources you used to have your on-wiki contests.
Examples: Money spent on program, volunteer hours invested in program, staff hours invested in program

• Example
• Example
• Example...etc...

Programming activities

Explanation: In 2 to 3 sentences, please share what you did! The entire process would be placed here.
Examples: "Promoting the event through Twitter and Facebook," "recruited volunteers through mailing lists to participate," "promoted the event to subject interest experts like professors," "worked with a museum who sponsored the contest with books for prizes" "promoted it on wiki through WikiProjects" "developed a bot to tag theme articles" "created a point system"

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Participants

Explanation: In one sentence please share who attended your on-wiki contest.
Examples: "100 Wikipedians - 75 are experienced, the rest are new editors" "10 were women" "20 English language editors, 14 Hindi language editors, 5 German language editors" "2 curators" "1 librarian".

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Goals of the program

Explanation: In a bullet point list (*), please share what the goals of your on-wiki contest? What changes did you want to happen?
Examples: "Boost contributions by active editors by 50% during contest," "Improve 100 articles about women's history," "10 out of 100 articles improved will become featured articles" "20 did you know's" "25 articles transcribed on WikiSource".

• Example
• Example
• Example....etc...

Any program evaluation strategy used?

Explanation: In 2 to 3 sentences please share if you used any program evaluation strategies for the on-wiki contest.
Examples: "Survey all participants" "Used categories to track creation of articles" "Used Magnus' tools" "Used a WikiProject system to track the articles and quality of them"

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Any program results or highlights you were able to measure?

Explanation: In a bullet point list (*) please share any results or highlights from your program evaluation strategy that you used to evaluate your on-wiki contest.
Examples: "We had a 60% respond rate to our online survey." "Participants edited 2000 bytes more during the competition time," "5 featured articles out of 10 were created" "150 articles about maps were improved" "25 new articles" "15 new editors and all of them said they would come back if there was another contest."

• Example
• Example
• Example...etc...

Are there any program results that you would like to measure?

Explanation: In a bullet point list (*) please share what type of results from your on-wiki contest would you like to measure?
Examples: "Easily track how articles have changed before, during, and after the contest" "Track how many bytes each and all participants contribute" "See who has edited after the contest," "Determine what areas of Wikipedia need the help"

• Example
• Example
• Example...etc...

Is there anything else you would like to share?

Explanation: In 2 to 3 sentences, please share anything else about your program you'd like to share with other program leaders.

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