User:Dr. Blofeld has been editing Wikipedia for nearly 20 years. As well as being a prolific writer, Dr. Blofeld has organised many editing drives to encourage others to improve Wikipedia in the spirit of friendly competition. The European Destubathon concluded earlier this year in April, and Dr. Blofeld already has his sights on The World Destubathon which began on 16 June and runs until 16 July. Prizes for both contests were provided by the Open Knowledge Association (OKA). As Dr. Blofeld prepares for The World Destubathon, we caught up with him about how the European contest went.
Running over 30 miles a week and keeping very fit has given me a lot of renewed energy and enthusiasm and makes me more motivated to run something on a large scale to improve everything. Over half of all articles on Wikipedia are still ‘stubs’ – pages with sometimes just a sentence or two about a subject. The idea behind a Destubathon is to encourage Wikipedia editors to focus on these articles. With the OKA and Wikimedia UK prepared to provide prize money, it felt the right time to give running contests another shot.
With first-hand experience of translating a lot of articles into English from other European language Wikipedias, I know how much of a gap there is in quality and breadth of content. So I wanted to run something to benefit European countries and bring together Wikipedia editors to focus on some of the shortest articles about Europe. I simply set up the contest based on the African Destubathon model and then sent out invitations to past contestants and challenge contributors. Participants were asked to focus on articles with 1,500 characters of readable prose or less (only 200–300 words) and self-report what they had been working on. Prizes for the most articles improved on individual countries added extra motivation.
4,046 articles were produced for The European Destubathon. Over 1,200 articles were on women’s biographies. 441 articles were submitted for the WMUK prize for most British destubs alone, though there were many more done than this in the main list. I was pleased to see destubs for countries which rarely get attention. Andorra stood out in particular due to a few editors expanding stubs I once created like 15 years ago!
I found the contest far easier to run than previous contests due to no scoreboard. I averaged about 3 hours a day patrolling, not a problem for me, but a prize could always be given for helping judge articles if people interested in running contests can’t commit to that.
It was clear that Wikipedia’s editors have a lot of enthusiasm for a targeted approach like this, and there seems to be joy in particular at seeing a diversity of topics and colourful flags coming in. Over one hundred people registered for the competition. While the competition covered articles about Europe, it was open to anyone globally, so we had participants from the US, India, and New Zealand. After pausing for a breather I started work on a sequel: The World Destubathon. This time stub articles related to anywhere in the world and cleanups of longer articles are eligible! I’m looking forward to seeing the results.