Microgrants/Oxford Law Competition: Difference between revisions
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{{ambox|Hey all, I'm still working on this so it may be worth holding off on the comments until I'm done. Thanks!}} | |||
; Overview | ; Overview | ||
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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 obviously with some differences. The details are outlined below, but we would feel that the provision of a first prize of £100 (probably in the form of book tokens) would be very useful in this endeavour. | 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 obviously with some differences. The details are outlined below, but we would feel that the provision of a first prize of £100 (probably in the form of book tokens) would be very useful in this endeavour. | ||
I am familiar with hacking MediaWiki. I would personally choose to run the competition on | 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. It would last 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 proposed dates for this is the early summer, since first year lawyers here have exams in the late spring. It would last for between a fortnight and a month. | |||
The articles (20 to 30) 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, but with the possibility of crossovers into politics, history and other subjects. The target articles will be aspects of law that students will be both personally knowledgeable about and are likely to have good sources for to hand. My own opinion is that sticking to articles about specific named cases (such as [[en:R (ProLife Alliance) v. BBC|''R (ProLife Alliance) v. BBC'']]) would allow for very clear and concise advice about what to write and how to write it. The "Wikimedia" aspect would be de-emphasised at first, bringing (in effect) new "editors" into the fold: there is no chance of this contest merely representing paying editors for editing, which has been a concern with other proposals. | The articles (20 to 30) 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, but with the possibility of crossovers into politics, history and other subjects. The target articles will be aspects of law that students will be both personally knowledgeable about and are likely to have good sources for to hand. My own opinion is that sticking to articles about specific named cases (such as [[en:R (ProLife Alliance) v. BBC|''R (ProLife Alliance) v. BBC'']]) would allow for very clear and concise advice about what to write and how to write it. The "Wikimedia" aspect would be de-emphasised at first, bringing (in effect) new "editors" into the fold: there is no chance of this contest merely representing paying editors for editing, which has been a concern with other proposals. | ||
Revision as of 17:55, 31 January 2012
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- 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 obviously with some differences. The details are outlined below, but we would feel that the provision of a first prize of £100 (probably in the form of book tokens) would be very useful in this endeavour.
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. It would last 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 articles (20 to 30) 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, but with the possibility of crossovers into politics, history and other subjects. The target articles will be aspects of law that students will be both personally knowledgeable about and are likely to have good sources for to hand. My own opinion is that sticking to articles about specific named cases (such as) would allow for very clear and concise advice about what to write and how to write it. The "Wikimedia" aspect would be de-emphasised at first, bringing (in effect) new "editors" into the fold: there is no chance of this contest merely representing paying editors for editing, which has been a concern with other proposals.
There is a strong possibility of follow-up, however, 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 would allow it to be included in one of their regular emails - most if not all articles could see strong improvements.
There are obviously some technicalities to work out: we'd want to allow, and indeed foster, teamwork (for example, on an intercollegiate basis), with the teams allowed to split the prize money if they'd cooperated on a particularly good article. 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. 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.
- 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