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