Wiki4MediaFreedom contest
Description and background
Drawing on a GLAM initiative, Osservatorio Balcani Caucaso Transeuropa has been running the Wiki4MediaFreedom initiative since 2015. This initiative aims at boosting the availability of accurate knowledge on media freedom and pluralism in Europe on Wikipedia, resulting in open-access, freely reusable quality contents for the wider public in multiple languages.
The Wiki4MediaFreedom editorial effort has focussed on media landscapes and other media freedom-related issues in South-east Europe, the Eastern Partnership countries, and Turkey, as well as Visegrád countries, and Baltic States.
Dozens of quality articles have been created and updated in English, focussing on specific topics like transparency of media ownership; media concentration; access to public information; censorship and self-censorship, with a set of country entries developed for each of them.
Now it is time to further share this knowledge with the wider Wikipedia community and foster societal engagement at local level to increase the ownership of Wiki4MediaFreedom in several languages across Europe: that’s why on the World Press Freedom Day (May 3rd) we launch the Wiki4MediaFreedom Writing & Translation Contest to invite the community to contribute and join the Wiki4MediaFreedom initiative in support of media freedom, pluralism and quality journalism in Europe and beyond.
What you can do: Updating, Expanding, Translating
Within the Wiki4MediaFreedom Writing & Translation Contest, you can:
- translate an existing article from English into the other target languages, i.e. Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian.
- update and improve existing articles in English.
We invite users to translate into the target languages the articles on the recently killed journalists Daphne Caruana Galicia and Ján Kuciak which are currently present only in a few linguistic editions of Wikipedia.
Target languages
Target languages are: English, Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.
Rules for participation
Duration
The contest will symbolically be launched on May 3rd, 2018, i.e. World Press Freedom Day, and will last till July 15th, 2018. NB: Deadline was postponed (initial deadline was June, 3rd)
Participation is open to all users registered to Wikipedia before May 3rd, 2018.
List of articles
Please, pick the article you wish to work on from the list below. Participants can freely choose to work on further items, provided they are added to the list. To avoid overlapping, we ask you to report your name and the language you are working on on the tables below next to the article on which you want to work.
Articles to translate
Target languages: Italian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
- Articles to be translated can also be chosen among the articles included in the Category Journalism Organisations in Europe. Users may propose additional articles to translate.
Articles to update / improve
Target languages: English
Articles to be updated / improved can also be chosen among the articles included in the Category Journalism Organisations in Europe. Users may propose additional articles to improve.
Jury and prizes
A jury, composed of experts in the field of media freedom and Wikipedians, will review the articles translated, improved and updated and award prizes to the winners. The jury will include researchers and curators of the Media Freedom Resource Centre, an online open online platform that facilitates quick and systematic access to an ever-growing collection of resources on media freedom and pluralism in Europe. The jury will also include the multilingual network of translators and local correspondents of OBCT.
Contest participants will be responsible for tracking their work on the main contest page in META. They will list each article they have worked on. We are using a simple scoring system: one point will be given for each 1,000 bytes improved and translated. 3 points will be given for every new source added. The addition of local quality source will be positively evaluated.
- Prizes will be given for the two categories, i.e. Translation and improving/updating content, to the top three scorers. Prizes are online gift voucher.
- TRANSLATION / across languages
- first place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 50
- second place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 30
- third place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 20
- IMPROVING / UPDATING CONTENT:
- first place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 50
- second place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 30
- third place: Amazon voucher of the value of EUR 20
Additional information
The Wiki4MediaFreedom Writing & Translation Contest is part of the broader initiative Wiki4MediaFreedom. In addition to the editorial effort, we have worked to mobilise the Wikipedia community with two Wiki4MediaFreedom edit-a-thon which have been have been held respectively in Belgrade (2016) and in Sofia (2017), in cooperation with Wikimedia national chapter, user groups as well as other organisations. New edition of the Wiki4MediaFreedom edit-a-thon will be run over the course of 2018.
The Wiki4MediaFreedom initiative is part of the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom.
Winners
- Translations
- 1st Prize: Kaspo for the article Libertà dei media in Russia translated into Italian
- 2nd Prize: Camelia.boban for the article Media in Serbia translated into Italian
- 3rd Prize: Goth nespresso for the article Omicidio di Ján Kuciak translated into Italian
- 3rd Prize ex aequo: Mudroslov for the article Daphne Caruana Galizia translated into Croatian
- Improvements
- 3rd Prize: Prose-proem for the article World Press Freedom Day improved in English
The other prizes for the category "Improvements" have not been assigned.
Congratulations to the Winners and thank you to all participants!