Microgrants/Oxford Law Competition

Overview

I am an Oxford University PPE undergraduate; my brother Grandiose is an Oxford University law undergraduate. Together we were thinking of running a very specific contest to improve (mostly British) case law articles on the English Wikipedia. This would be run in the mould of an essay competition, but working on articles rather than a single essay. We feel that the provision of a first prize of £100 (probably in the form of book tokens) would be very useful in this endeavour.

The target case articles (25 to 35; example:) would be selected by hand on the basis of potential for improvement and integration with the courses here at Oxford. These will be primarily law-related, but with the possibility of crossovers into politics, history and other subjects. As a result, students will be both personally knowledgeable about the cases (having studied them) and are likely to have good sources for them to hand. This system would also allow for very clear and concise advice about what to write and how to write it. Consequently, the whole system is designed to bring new "editors" into the fold: there is no chance of this contest merely representing the payment of editors for editing, which I note has been a concern with other similar proposals.

I am familiar with hacking MediaWiki. I would therefore personally choose to run the competition on a custom wiki with a slimmed down interface. The proposed dates for this is the early summer, since first year lawyers here have exams in the late spring; and I imagine it lasting for between a fortnight and a month. A second advantage of leaving the contest until then is that would allow for the use of the new Visual Editor, so that entrants don't need to learn wikicode to enter. The entries would, with proper documentation, and under a watchful eye, later be imported into the English Wikipedia.

There is also a strong possibility of follow-up, this being made all the more attractive by the highly intelligent, highly literate and generally academically nature of the likely entrants. My feeling is that with proper advertisement - the student email system here is very well used, and it is possible if not probable that the Law faculty and/or law-related societies would allow it to be included in one of their regular emails - most if not all articles could undergo drastic improvement.

There are obviously some technicalities to work out: we'd want to allow, and indeed foster, teamwork, for example, probably by having teams each work on their own forks of the articles. The best team overall would be given the prize; at the moment we're considering that entrants would be distributed to teams by virtue of their college, allowing for the "intercollegiate" aspect to be emphasised. Note that unlike other contests, the nature of judging sandbox articles allows for a thorough and flexible, yet non-scary judging system to be set up. Finally, my brother and I would be more than welcome to provide help and support during the competition period to nudge teams/individuals in the right direction, and, at the end of it, to oversee the merging of new content into the English Wikipedia. Ideally, we'd want to find 1-3 other volunteers to actually do the judging so as to minimise the risk of bias.

Expected outcomes

Improvements to ~25 important case law articles

Who I am

I have not been involved in much outreach work per se, but both myself and my brother have very strong editing track records on the English Wikipedia (my user page, his user page). Thank you for consideration and no doubt helpful advice. Jarry1250 16:37, 31 January 2012 (UTC)

Discussion

I really like this idea, but I would recommend holding the contest on Wikipedia itself. You would need to provide a lot of support to the contestants, but it means they actually gain experience of editing Wikipedia. If they edit using a slimmed down interface on a walled-garden site, they will then have to make the big jump to Wikipedia after the contest when you won't be able to support them as well (or, more likely, they won't end up editing Wikipedia at all). Also, there is a risk with sandbox articles that you'll end up with something unsuitable for Wikipedia at the end of it. If it's on Wikipedia from the start, other editors can steer it in the right direction if it needs it. Another advantage to having it on Wikipedia is that you can use the existing article assessment system as part of the judging process (it's always good to align your judging with what Wikipedia wants, and that's the easiest way to do it). --Tango 00:28, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

This was something I (we) gave considerable thought to, so I can flesh out a few of the reasons why a walled-garden site is worth the hassle (I think you do a good job of giving the contra position):

• Running the contest on Wikipedia exposes editors to vandalism, not least from teams from other colleges.
• Running the contest on Wikipedia means that teams would potentially work on the same articles, yielding a variety of problems judging-wise.
• Wikipedia itself has no notion of "teams" to which participants could identify, and thus misses an integral motivating factor of an intercollegiate contest. Ditto "Oxford" branding, and/or the logo of participating societies which make editors feel "at home" in the editing world.
• As will be admitted, the learning curve for Wikipedia at the moment is very, very steep (certainly compared to a beta Visual Editor). Providing an interim stage yields a "slowly, slowly catchy monkey" approach to introducing new editors into the editing environment without scaring them. Even getting to them to the point of editing (i.e. the starting line) usually requires significantly more manpower and time from both mentors and teams than they're likely to have during term time. At the same time, it's a little pointless to get them to learn wikitext in June when it's going to obsolete for casual writers by August.
• I simply don't trust the edit review process on-wiki to helpfully guide participants in the correct direction rather than getting them trapped in a revert-warning cycle.
• Challenges regarding softblocks, hardblocks, etc, would need to be overcome (a minor point, I know).
• I can't see a reason to be beholden to onwiki judging processes, particularly given the need for time-sensitive reviewing, and general judging criteria in-keeping with an enticing writing prospect.

(I may have missed other points.) Overall, I just feel that a direct-Wikipedia approach would yield a greatly reduced number of participants by making it harder for them to get started. IMHO, the Wikimedia movement would be far better off easing 30-50 new editors in over a longer period of time, rather than throwing them in at the deep end. Regards, Jarry1250 14:36, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

Everything you say is true, but remember your goal isn't to create a few articles and hold a successful contest. Your goal is to attract new editors to Wikipedia. I just don't think you'll do that if you aren't actually on Wikipedia. --Tango 00:27, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Sure. But the way I see it, a happy, successful competition in which many students take part - students who can then be inducted gradually afterwards into the body of editors, probably after the release of the VE to the English Wikipedia - is far more likely to achieve editor growth than an unhappy, unsuccessful competition that includes only the handful of students brave enough to actually edit Wikipedia. That was really my point. Jarry1250 11:11, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

You both make very good points on either side of the debate here. I have to say that I would personally prefer to see this take place directly on Wikipedia, but as Jarry points out that does present challenges that would distract from this activity. There's a lot of valuable knowledge for participants to learn just in terms of how to write a Wikipedia article, let alone all of the formatting and stonewalling issues that may arise. Plus, there's a good opportunity here to learn whether taking a different approach to this sort of thing works - if at the end of this we find that we have gained some additional articles and have run a successful competition, but that the participants haven't gone on to contribute further to Wikipedia, then we know this approach works in the short-term but not the long-term. If they do continue to contribute, then that's fantastic, and we've learned something new. Either way, I'm not sure there is a downside here.

So, I'm inclined to approve this. However, I have a few requests. First, ideally the articles involved in the competition would not yet exist on the English Wikipedia - if they do, then they should be stubs that haven't been edited recently (and a notice should be posted on their talk pages to say they're involved in this competition). Any potential for conflict with edits made directly on Wikipedia should be minimised. Second, WikiProject Law and any other related wikiprojects should be kept in the loop about this and should know which articles/topics are involved in the competition, and ideally they would be invited to participate in the jury. Third, the process would ideally remain transparent - it would be good if the community can see what is happening, and are able to provide feedback either directly or indirectly. Would these be possible here? Thanks. Mike Peel 23:42, 7 February 2012 (UTC)

Those all seem like good points, Mike, and easy to take on board. I suspect the best form of feedback would be on-Wikipedia, since it would be open and familiar to WP editors but students would be unlikely to read it (and hence to take it as personal criticism). I'm sorry if I came across as very opposed to the suggestion of running it on-Wikipedia - I think it has its merits but equally it would be nice to try something new(ish - similar to WLM I think). Jarry1250 17:45, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

OK, let's see how this goes then - am happy to approve the microgrant. :-) Logistically, I think we should be able to send the book token(s) directly to the winners once the competition's ended. Mike Peel 20:49, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

I have doubts about doing it off wiki too but this seems like a chance to try out this way with little risk or cost. I (for what that's worth) say lets let Jarry try it his way. When we see what happens we can decide what to do next. Filceolaire 20:32, 8 February 2012 (UTC)

Update (26 February)

So just to update everyone, we have now built a proper website (http://openlaw2012.co.uk) and are taking signups. We've already had a small core of interest from our first round of advertising and will be building on that over the coming month. Jarry1250 (talk) 12:29, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Looks good, thanks for the update. :-) Mike Peel (talk) 17:30, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

Update 3rd May

Grandiose and I came to the decision this week that interest was insufficient to warrant (a) spending £100 of the charity's money and (b) investing the time to make the technical side work properly (including Visual Editor). Potential participants have been notified of the postponement, and it is my hope that we can recapture their interest in Michaelmas Term (October-November this year). It was obviously a disappointing end, but one that I hope we can tease some insights out of. Jarry1250 (talk) 01:10, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update; I'm sorry to hear that this has had to be postponed. Mike Peel (talk) 19:20, 3 May 2012 (UTC)

Suggestion

If this were revived, make it broader than Oxford. There are a significant number of law faculties in the UK. Rich Farmbrough, 20:09, 20 February 2013 (UTC).