Wikipedia:Million Award

The Million Award recognizes editors who bring one of Wikipedia's most-viewed articles or lists to good article (GA), featured article (FA) or featured list (FL) status, serving hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers. The award has two primary goals:


 * 1) to recognize editors who improve important, high-traffic articles
 * 2) to encourage all Wikipedians by reminding them of the huge volume of readers helped by our work

The award is partly inspired by User:TCO's essay "Improving Wikipedia's important articles", which observes that most Wikipedia incentives value the quantity of promoted content over the importance of promoted content. The Million Award seeks to balance these incentives by recognizing editors who sometimes produce fewer articles, but who serve vast numbers of readers by writing about topics of broad interest.

The "million" in Million Award refers to the article receiving at least one million views per year. Other tiers of Million Award also exist: Quarter-Million Award, Half Million Award, and Three-Quarter Million Award.

Qualifying articles
Any article with sufficient readership, calculated independently of Main Page appearances, qualifies for the Million Award. This includes most Vital Articles (e.g., Buddhism, Joan of Arc, Moon) as well as some contemporary topics (e.g., One Direction, The Walking Dead). Somewhere between 3000 to 4000 articles have sufficient readership to qualify for the top tier of the award—approximately one tenth of one percent of Wikipedia's total content. See the lists of popular pages by WikiProject for potential candidates.

An article's readership can be determined with the page view statistics tool, accessible through the "View History" tab of an article. Simply enter the article's name and choose a one-year date range, such as 1/1/YYYY - 12/31/YYYY for the previous calendar year. If the article appeared on the Main Page during that one-year period, or if most of the article's views came during an unusual 1- or 2-day spike, then exclude those days or select another one-year period if possible, or use the readership for a recent 90-day period and multiply by 4. (Or multiply by 4.06, if you have a calculator handy and/or want to be more precise.) If you find yourself doing more math than this, or searching your article's history for the highest-readership 90-day period, you're taking this award much too seriously.

The exact method of calculation is ultimately up to the editor awarding it (including self-awarding), and should be guided by personal honor and common sense. Like any user page bling, the Million Award exists only for editor encouragement and fun, and should never be subject to dispute over who "deserves" it. The Million Award should generally only be given for an article's current readership, not for past spikes. However, a Million Award is not revoked if an article's popularity later declines.

The Million Award is intended only for editors, and confers no special status on the article itself.

Tiers
Four tiers of the Million Award exist:


 * The Quarter-Million Award – Awarded for bringing an article with an annual readership of more than 250,000 to GA or FA status
 * The Half-Million Award – Awarded for bringing an article with an annual readership of more than 500,000 to GA or FA status
 * The Three-Quarter Million Award – Awarded for bringing an article with an annual readership of more than 750,000 to GA or FA status
 * The Million Award – Awarded for bringing an article with an annual readership of more than a million to GA or FA status

Userboxes
Where pageviews is a numeral without commas, and status is one of,   or.

Top icon
Use to put a MA icon in the top right of your user page as seen on this page.

Banner awards
Use on a user's talk page to reward their efforts.

See Template:Millionaward/testcases for further examples.

Hall of Fame
The table below lists some of the articles and editors who have been awarded the highest tier of the Million Award. Editors are welcome to add themselves or others to the list. Entries should be removed only by the user themselves, except in extreme cases of dishonesty (such as listing an article never promoted to GA or FA) or vandalism. Like the award itself, this list exists only for encouragement, not for strict record-keeping.

Requests
If you believe one of your articles qualifies for a Million Award, but would prefer that another editor double-check and give the award, please leave a request on the talk page.