Wikipedia talk:The Core Contest/Entries/Archive 2 - 2014 contest

Core contest results
Sorry for the delay, a message from will be on shortly. Here are the winners of the this year core contest. We appreciate all the work that was done over the course of the month.


 * First place goes to for his major expansion in Ottonian art
 * A tie for second place goes to for her wonderful work in Poultry and  for his massive cleanup effort in Philosophy of science
 * Fourth place goes to for expanding the core article Literature.
 * Fifth place goes to for his work on Drink.

We want to thank everyone for participating in this year's core contest and we hope to see everyone again next year. From the judges panel.

Secret account 02:32, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Yee-ha! Thanks to the judges & organizers for all your work, & congratulations to the other winners.  I thought this was a very productive run of the contest, & great to see an increased number of entries. The state of several articles on very major subjects before shows the need for this contest, & I hope to see it return after the usual interval. Johnbod (talk) 03:05, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, I'm not above pointing out that it seems absurd for an article (not currently on nor likely to ever appear on the relevant vital lists) on an obscure period of German art to win the "core" contest. I thought the point was that it is relatively easy to improve narrow articles compared to overhauling a major article. This seems like a terrible precedent to set. But I understand that judging is difficult and poorly paid. :o) Thank you for the recognition of my efforts! -hugeTim (talk) 06:41, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * As I said in the other announcement thread (I was not aware that there were two, why are there two?), this was a very difficult contest to judge. Every judge came at it differently, and ranked their picks differently. I assessed each entry on a 100 point scale, based closely on the metric that I laid out at Wikipedia talk:The Core Contest. In my metric, "Coreness" was worth 30% of the score, the most out of any of the five criteria I was grading on, but not so much as to drown out significant improvements in other areas. I won't reveal what my ranking was (and certainly won't talk about the other judges' rankings), except to say that none of the judges' rankings perfectly match the final results.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  07:20, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well done to everyone who participated, and to the winners! I enjoyed all the topics that were submitted for this year's competition. And many thanks to the judges for performing a fairly thankless task with much finesse and grace. Cheers, MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 14:14, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Sven, by what criteria is Ottonian art even eligible for the contest? That, at least, deserves an explanation from the judges for future reference. -hugeTim (talk) 14:58, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Fine, I'll talk. I personally wasn't about to kick anyone's entries out; the "Coreness" criteria of my scoring already gave me a way to give more "Core" articles a leg up. Ultimately, I gave that article a score of 10/30 in "Coreness" (tied for second lowest), with the comment "This would be of interest to large groups of people (Christians, Germanic peoples), but is still a niche topic.". It was able to get into my top four (based on how the scores broke, I had a top four, not a top five) because it had the second highest "raw improvements" score (the other four sections, i.e. the quality of the improvements to the article, irrespective of "Coreness"). Considering that I gave seven entries either 30/30 or 25/30 in "Coreness", I feel that Ottonian art had a major handicap that it had to overcome to get to my top four.  S ven M anguard   Wha?  15:48, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Please consider that under your scoring system, it is quite likely that an article with 0/30 coreness could win the "core contest", particularly because it is easier to score high on raw improvements for such articles. If you insist on quantifying your assessments, it would make more sense to multiply the coreness and raw improvement scores rather than add them together. -hugeTim (talk) 17:39, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Also, the article is plausibly of interest to only a minority of Germanic people and a tiny fraction of Christians, so I'm having a hard time imagining large groups of people considering it a core entry in an encyclopedia. To be clear, I'm not at all asking for a different result this time. Let's just clarify the rules for next time so entrants know they will be recognized for working on actual core articles. -hugeTim (talk) 03:46, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Since the grumbling is continuing, I'll just point out that I addressed the "coreness" issue on the entry page. I think we all know that the "vital article" lists, compiled years ago, are distinctly odd for many areas. They certainly are for art, mostly consisting of artist's biographies. Johnbod (talk) 20:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * I concede this has been tricky and we had five judges who weighted areas - mainly "coreness" vs "improvement" - differently. I find this a difficult one and this is the first competition that we had a real dilemma about it. I think this time we'd maybe better have some discussion so that entrants are better informed about what articles they might want to improve. One reason that we have several prizewinners and modest prizes is so that everyone can feel good about it. We'll close it here and open it up on the main contest talk page and try to get some consensus from as many participants as possible as to how we might look at entries in future. There I will clarify how I've looked at it thus far and others can give what their ideal is. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:14, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Johnbod, your comments there and here are totally disconnected from the actual vital list. The visual art article selection is sensible and there are no artist bios . Which of the artist pages listed do you consider less important than Ottonian art? Are you referring to some earlier version of the list? Vital level 4 is irrelevant as you know. By the way, I'm curious whether you considered working on History of art, which is generously rated C-class despite having only 19 inline references and a very poorly defined structure. (I am confident it also lacks the word Ottonian.) -hugeTim (talk) 03:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * "With the decline of the Roman Empire, the narrative shifts to Medieval art, which lasted for a millennium. The high intellectual culture of the Medieval period was Islamic, but the era also included Early Christian art, Byzantine art, Anglo-Saxon art,  Viking art, Ottonian art, Romanesque art and Gothic art."  Actually, refs or not, it is not in too bad shape for such a broad survey - have you thought of reading it? I've only done 10 edits, the last in 2012, but a sentence like that really doesn't benefit much from a reference, although I will remove the rampant POV. I don't want to repeat what I said at the entries, but if you look at standard popular global art histories like Gombrich or Honour and Fleming, they devote more space to major movements than artists, and rightly so. Monet, Dali, & Kahlo are especially likely to be missed. And so on. Actually touching History of art up & referencing to a basic textbook would have been a far quicker job than expanding Ottonian art. Johnbod (talk) 12:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * How interesting that that quote is no longer accurate. But neither it nor your newly revised version suggests Ottonian art is a core article. Anyway, I am glad I brought the sorry state of History of art to your attention, since its presence on the Level 2 Vital list was not sufficient to do so. (I did briefly review the article, but I was not sure which of the bizarrely ordered sections to look at in detail, and an automatic search is more complicated to do on my phone. That is why I qualified my statement as "confident." But I was wrong.) -hugeTim (talk) 14:17, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * As I said, I have edited it 10 times over the years. But for the Core Contest I prefer to take articles that are in a really terrible state, which this isn't, given how basic a survey it is. I think this thread has gone on long enough now. Johnbod (talk) 15:12, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * HugeTim has a point. And I happened to be looking at the level 1 vital articles recently and noticed that the arts is quite weak, being just start class!   It's nobody's fault but it seems remarkable that there should still be such low hanging fruit at level 1. Andrew (talk) 22:27, 8 April 2014 (UTC)