Submissions/Efficient and sustainable sponsored contests in Wikipedia
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This submission is on the wait list for Wikimania 2013. |
- Submission no.
- 3034
- Subject no.
- C1
- Title of the submission
- Efficient and sustainable sponsored contests in Wikipedia
- Type of submission
- presentation
- Author of the submission
- Andriy Makukha
- Country of origin
- Ukraine
- Affiliation
- Wikimedia Ukraine
- E-mail address
- andriy.makukha
gmail.com - Username
- Amakuha
- Personal homepage or blog
- Abstract
- In this talk, the author will share experience of organizing efficient sponsored Wikipedia writing contests. Special attention will be paid to such questions as: how to make a contest 99% fair and objective? how to not break any Wikipedia rules with a contest? how to motivate users with different contributing styles to compete? what prizes work best? etc.
- Some insights on proper psychological incentives for wikipedians will be also given together with possible solution to drawbacks of such photo contests as Wiki Loves Monuments.
- Detailed proposal
- Ukrainian Wikipedia has an original set of awards and elaborate user rankings which prove to motivate users to produce certain effective way of contributing (not just do as much edits as possible and create many stubs). Wikimedia Ukraine also awards a monthly symbolic offline prize for the greatest amount of text written in Ukrainian Wikipedia in a month both among newbies and experienced wikipedians.
- But on Autumn 2011 Wikimedia Ukraine has come up with a new way to popularize writing to Wikipedia. We organized a first Wikipedia articles writing contest in Ukraine. The event was sponsored by Wikimedia France (€2000) and supported by some major Ukrainian media. It was devoted to “writing about France in Ukrainian Wikipedia and writing about Ukraine in French Wikipedia”. Two thirds of the money were used for prizes. The main prizes were quite impressive: a trip to Paris, a netbook and e-readers.
- The competitive atmosphere of the contest generated more than 500 articles with 8 Mb wikitext in Ukrainian Wikipedia in 7 weeks. But among six winners of the contest, three registered in Wikipedia specially for the event (they did not have prior experience with any kind of wiki or markup language at all). At the same time, as would not be expected, the final versions of articles were of very high quality. And there were virtually no clashes between common “voluntary” life of Wikipedia as we used to, with the “contest” life. — All of this, we believe, was due to the effective set of rules developed by us. Particularly, the rules relied heavily on the ability of the contest coordinators to do quite complex computations (with a special Wikipedia bot). Contestants competed both in quality (subjective measure, determined by jury) of the articles and in their total size (objective measure). Final points of the contestants were determined by mathematical formula.
- In a month after the first contest, Wikimedia Ukraine announced another contest of the same type. This time it was sponsored by a major charity organization of Ukraine, and was devoted to charity. The event has tripled a number of articles about charity in Ukrainian Wikipedia, as well as brought the chapter to the limelight of local charity funds. (see picture)
- Another two contests of this type were held on Winter 2012 and on Spring 2013. Both of them were aimed on improving articles about specific regions of Ukraine. In the latter we appended the rules to include a "sustainable" photo contest, designed to motivate competitors to upload original photos of high quality that nobody else uploaded before. This contest brought more than 1100 images to Commons, which is three times more than Wiki Loves Monuments generated from the region. Both regional contests were very successful in local media.
- Wikimedia Ukraine is now negotiating to organize a fifth contest of this type with a major national charity fund.
- In this talk, the author will share the experience of organizing efficient Wikipedia contests. A thorough analysis of results of the contests (participation of contestants after the contests, feedback of supporters and opponents of this type of events) will be presented. Some other original and effective psychological incentives of Ukrainian Wikipedia will be mentioned.
- Track
- WikiCulture and Community
- Length of presentation/talk
- 20 minutes
- Language of presentation/talk
- English
- Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
- Yes
- Slides or further information (optional)
- Will be available
- Special requests
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