Microgrants/Core Contest (prizes)/Report

Completion

Is your project completed?

Part Open-ended, part done. The idea is a contest that can be run and completed over a two month period (including lead-up and judging afterwards). It has been run three times to date (March 10 to March 31 2012, August 1 to August 31 2012 and April 15 to May 12 2013) and will likely next be run in February 2014.

Have you submitted all receipts for any expenses paid?

N/A - all fiscal items were directly handled by WMUK.

Activities and lessons learned

Activities

The Core Contest was an editing contest run over four weeks in which editors competed to improve core content. Articles were selected from the list of Vital Articles or a list of key articles identified by Danny some years ago. The best improvements of the worst/broadest core articles won prizes, consisting of Amazon vouchers of varying amounts. The rationale was that much core content had seen little improvement for some years and we should be looking at ways of improving our core portfolio, as it were. The thoroughness of wikipedia's auditing processes (GAN and FAC) has meant that it is much easier and more rewarding to focus on narrow rather than broad articles.

Lessons learned

What went well?

People seemed to enjoy the contest and some great article improvements were seen. Notably, food articles (sugar, Cabbage and lettuce) (these are underrepresented in Featured Content), as well as a few broad biology ones (horse, shrimp, ecosystem and amphibian) as well as some core history material (middle ages, Metamorphoses, romanticism, Sculpture) and more modern such as Marie Curie, Nazi Germany and Franz Kafka (which got [1] 768,586 hits as Main Page Featured Article this year) and really big ones like Sea. Several are now Featured Articles.

What did not go well?

Nothing inherently, though I do wonder whether writing these sort of articles has become specialised, hence only a small number of editors felt confident enough to enter.

What would you do differently if you plan a similar project in the future?

The contest itself? Not sure. I do think it fulfilled what it intended to do, which is improve core content. I think it can be complemented by other contests that might have broader appeal, like the Stub contest. I have some ideas for some others too.

Expected outcomes

This section should reference the expected outcomes and measures of success described in the approved grant submission.

Provide the expected outcomes here.

Bit by bit, improving the quality of wikipedia's portfolio of core articles. Also, by providing impetus ot shove towards FA status, broaden our readership and exposure by having broad articles on the mainpage

Did you achieve the expected outcomes? How do you know the outcome was achieved?

linking to content made and looking at pageviews

Impact

This section ties this project to Wikimedia UK's broader goals, and shows what the project accomplished.

What impact did this project have on WMUK's mission and the strategic goals?

presumably improving wikipedia's content is one of the goals....?

Reporting and documentation of expenditures

Did you send documentation of all expenses paid with grant funds to the office? Answer "Yes" or "No".

N/A - not handled by me

Final comments

Include any final comments you may have.

hopefully it also improves editing environment and camaraderie. It was fun to run. Casliber (talk) 13:21, 4 December 2013 (UTC)