Microgrants/Stub Contest (prizes)

Overview

• An amount of money for vouchers as prizes for a two week contest in sometime between late November and January outlined here. The idea is that there would be (say) a £75 voucher for first prize, £50 for second, and £25 for a number of "honorable mentions". Vouchers could be for some worldwide digital organisation, such as Amazon, I-tunes or something similar. Amazon is probably the easiest.

Budget

• See above - I guess it depends - £250 would give me a first, second and five "honourable mentions" as outlined above. The rationale for using vouchers is to distance the idea from paid editing.

Timeline

• Three weeks for the contest, all wound up after its completion and judging.

Expected outcomes

• To chip away at the huge number of stubs, and assist in recategorising some stubs which have since been expanded without labels being removed...and have some fun in doing so. I have also run the Core Contest, but think that the presence of some high calibre editors there might have driven away some folks - maybe a comeptition like this is less threatening and will attract a wider range of competitors.

Who I am

• I am Casliber on english wiki, and admin, ex-arb and content editor, and very familiar with content in mainspace, which is why I am thinking this is a good idea.

Discussion

• This sounds like a great idea to me. It's probably something that would appeal to a much larger fraction of editors than the core contest competition, and also potentially new editors, so it's probably worth advertising it much more as well, both on- and off-wiki (mention in members newsletter, blog, etc.?). It might be worth thinking about having it last a bit longer (a month perhaps?) to encourage more contributions and give less active editors more of an opportunity to enter it. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 08:25, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

That was my original thought - other folks thought shorter, but I think longer gives more bang for one's buck so to speak. I dont' think feelings are too strong any which way. Casliber (talk) 11:22, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Cas, just so you know: Katie Chan will be handling this contest this time round, rather than me - I'm too busy :-( Richard Symonds (WMUK) (talk) 19:20, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Great! Ummm...is it greenlit yet? Happy to run over four weeks. If all good, will get to work on promoting it. Cheers, Casliber (talk) 09:29, 6 November 2013 (UTC)

Approved as per the Core Contest (4th) grant. Running it over four weeks sounds good to me. -- Katie Chan (WMUK) (talk) 14:09, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Right, have notified the Signpost, placed it on the centralised template, and signalled for it to run over Dec 1 to 31. Any other ideas where to advertise/circulate welcome. 101.164.241.71 13:23, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Report for first running (December 2013)

The Stub Contest was run from 1 to 31 December 2013. Forty people entered (although of these three did not submit any entries). 676 stubs were expanded and 11,074 articles that had been labelled as stubs were rerated as start class or higher (one contestant reported he had another 30,000 stub rerates but ultimately declined to go through and provide diffs).

The oldest stub expanded was William Alston, which had been created on 16 January 2001 (the day after Wikipedia was founded!). Yvo de Boer was the expanded stub that had the most page views on 1 December 2013.

My initial intention with the stub re-rating was a supplementary way to earn points in the contest that also served to help the wikipedia community gain a more accurate picture of exactly how many stubs there are. However it became clear it was an easier way to earn points in the competition and rerate submissions vastly outnumbered expansions. Were this avenue removed from a subsequent re-running (which I think is very likely as re-rating is if negligible benefit to readers), I think the number of expansion submissions would be higher. Scrolling down the Entries list gave some idea of the diversity of articles submitted, and it was fascinating reading. There was some discussion on how large an article would be to still be classified as a stub, and I intend defining this more sharply before running the contest again. Other than that, I thought the contest ran pretty smoothly, and would love the opportunity to run it again in May 2014. Casliber (talk) 03:56, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Running this again in August 2014

I'd like to run this again - limiting the contest this time on stub expansions. Rerates will be part of a different contest - am thinking of a 3-day "template blitz" as looking over 100,000 rerates over a month would do my head in....Casliber (talk) 23:16, 7 July 2014 (BST)

Hi Casliber, am happy for this to go ahead. -- Katie Chan (WMUK) (talk) 13:28, 21 July 2014 (BST)

(belatedly) great! thanks! will keep you posted. Casliber (talk) 14:43, 9 August 2014 (BST)

Report for second running (September 2014)

The constest was run again from September 1 to 30 2014. 51 editors signed up for the contest, of which 28 successfully submitted de-stubbed articles. 362 stubs were expanded. Of these, 2 had been created in 2001, 14 in 2002, 2 in 2003, 43 in 2004, 27 in 2005, 32 in 2006, 128 in 2007, 31 in 2008, 16 in 2009, 16 in 2010, 19 in 2011, 12 in 2012, 16 in 2013, and 17 in 2014. A variety of articles were expanded. 73 were rated as high- or top-importance in a wikiproject. 22 were expanded significantly - to over 4500 b prose size.

Results

• First Place (£100): Dr. Blofeld, 1105 points
• Second Place (£50): Skr15081997, 1090 points
• Third Place (£25): Cwmhiraeth, 855 points
• Fourth Place (£25): Wizardman, 400 points

Dr. Blofeld also wins a prize for de-stubbing the oldest stub (£25), and for expanded stub with highest page views on September 1 2014 (£25).

For full score chart go here.

Proposal to run the competition a third time

I am preparing in advance this time! Currently I am busy running the core contest, but note that by April/May it will have been over six months since the last running of the stub contest (which is when I am thinking of running this one again). I was pleased at the material that got improved and wonder what the interest would be this time round. See my report above for previous running. I would run it with the same or very similar format to the previous running. cheers, Casliber (talk) 05:15, 13 March 2015 (GMT)