User:Catalan/Contest

Note: I will begin to seriously advertise the contest at some point in spring of 2009, with the hopes of having this start over the summer.

The idea of a writing contest, in which the winners would win a monetary prize in the form of sources for future Wikipedia articles, has been mulling around my mind for a long while. The problem with these types of grants, however, is that finding a source of money can be difficult; there are not very many individuals interested in donating the required amount of funds (or those who are, are more difficult to find). As a result, the easiest way to collect funding would be to have those interested in participating pay a fee of $5 (through PayPal) upfront. The "jar" would be the monetary prize, and depending on the amount of contestants there could be any given number of prizes give for each placement. Because this is a new contest, I'd like to start out without a monetary prize and instead give out a custom award. The idea is to build trust in the contest, so that contestants are more willing to pay to enter in the future (sending $5 to a Wikipedian is always a risk). If the contest's foundations are developed, not only will contestants be willing to pay for entry, but perhaps other (third-party members) would be willing to donate to increase the amount in the "pot". As a result, the first few contests will award barnstars to the top three editors (one of them custom). The contest is explained below.

Judges & the basis of judgment
There are many ways of judging the success of an author, or how much he deserves in relation to his peers in any given contest. The exact "formula" for this contest has not been developed, and will probably have to be developed throughout the evolution of this first contest. Basically, judges will be rating on the workload taken by the editor for the specific article and the improvement the article has gone through in the allotted time. The idea isn't to give points based on how many checkpoints the article has gone through. For instance, an article that has gone through a Good Article Review, a peer review, a WikiProject A-Class Review and then a Featured Article Candidacy will not receive more points than an article that went straight to Featured Article Candidacy (unless the workload in the mainspace was higher for that editor). In other words, we aren't judging the means, we're judging the end result. What we're interested in is the development of existing articles on Wikipedia to featured articles.

So, apparent factors in judgment: workload, quality (of prose, images and the article in general), time (this is a wild card, since editors who do more work in less time will receive more points).

Please include all discussion on judging on this article's talk page, thank you!

<- If interested, please add your name below in alphabetical order ->
 * Judges
 * 1) Cam - MilHist Coordinator - 3 FAs
 * 2) JonCatalán - MilHist Coordinator - 12 FAs

Which articles can I edit?
The idea is to focus on one article, which must be chosen from the existing stock of articles on Wikipedia (no new articles). Within those bounds, any article may be chosen, regardless of current class (a featured article in poor shape, that no longer meets the requirements, can be worth more than a good article in good shape and ready to go to featured article class, given that more work will have to be put in the former). Again, one of the major factors in deciding the winner will be workload (the amount of work put into the article). The article can be chosen from within any scope of Wikipedia; any WikiProject. The entire point is to increase the quality of articles on Wikipedia. If you need help locating an article, join a WikiProject you're interested in and look through the lower class articles which fall within their scope. For example, if you belong to WikiProject:Military History then look through the Stub, Start and B-class articles which fall within the scope of the project. I'm sure that you will have no problems finding an article which interests you.

Prizes

 * Medal of World Knowledge

This medal will be awarded to the winner of each contest. The award is unique to this competition, and will only be awarded to first place editors. It represents the contribution done to Wikipedia, and the world in general (by expanding the sum of global human knowledge on this encyclopedia).

Second & third place: Second place editors will receive the Writer's Barnstar, while third place editors will receive the Original Barnstar.

Ultimately, all three places will ideally receive monetary compensation.

Contestants for first "World Knowledge" contest
<- Add your username (wikilinking to your userpage) and then the article you plan to edit in alphabetical order below this line->