WikiProject Wales has been running a competition aimed at targeting core articles for Wales and getting them up to Good Article status. At the same time it is aiming to dramatically reduce the number of stub articles on wikipedia and encourage quality new content creation. You can see the scoreboard here, where User:Cwmhiraeth is currently leading the competition.
Awaken the Dragon follows on from the successful 20-20 Vision of Wales competition back in 2014. There is a £100 Amazon voucher prize for the overall winner, £50 for the runner up and another £100 divided between weekly winners and other special prizes. The prizes themselves are further intended to encourage positive creation and improvement on Wikipedia by encouraging people to buy their own books for future articles.
Enter the Dragon
Wikipedian Jim Anderson is running the competition in order to test out mechanisms for incentivising editing and introducing elements of competition into the process. You can see his proposal for the project here. Jim says:
‘This is about perfecting a mechanism which can directly impact upon content on wikipedia and getting work done which nobody will do in years! Eventually I’d like to see this extended to other countries or even major cities like London and New York. It’s a way WMUK can really get involved with improving the encyclopedia directly.’
Jim sees potential for extending this to Scotland, Ireland and other countries, encouraging teams of people to compete to expand the range of articles available and get more people editing.
Stat Attack
Jim is linking up with the Wikimedian in Residence at the National Library of Wales, Jason Evans, to run an edit-a-thon on Friday, April 22. Together, our Welsh contributors have made a huge impact on improving the content of Wikipedia in Welsh and articles about Wales. Welsh Wikipedia has expanded by 10% in the past year while the collaboration with the National Library of Wales has produced 13822 images which have been used in 3742 articles across 90 languages. These have been seen by 15 million people a month and a total of 32 million views.
It’s not too late to join the project. There’s a large number of core articles still needing improvement and a mass of stubs which need expanding, not to mention many missing articles. If you’re an aficionado in Welsh history, nature or A roads (don’t get too excited), this is the place for you. Even if you’re not, editing is a great way to improve your research skills. Maybe you’re a teacher in Wales who wants to give your students a practical way to assess and research source material. Wikipedia is even easier to edit than in the past with the addition of the Visual Editor, so why not try it yourself?