Simplify contest coordination and improve participant experience by featuring important information through event pages, using bots and automating tracking tools.
• Event Pages: Create contest event pages that will attract and delight your participants.
There is something really important about contest event pages. They offer a central meeting point to a group of people who may not normally work together or who do not know each other but share a similar interest. It is important to create an event page for your contest that will both help people get the information they need as well as provide a collaboration space to set and achieve achieve shared goals. A good event page can also help to build excitement and mutual support among contest participants.
“...when the competition is happening everything is linked to the event page, everybody goes through the pages and checks them out and improves them because they want to help...it feels like a festival.” - PhysiWiki
• Bots and automated trackers: Find tools to make contest coordination faster and easier.
"There is a bot pulls together all the different submissions, judges make sure they meet the requirements to be included: sufficient length, “good” article, etc. WikiCup would not work without a bot." - User:Miyagawa
Use bots to track, score, judge and deliver prizes for your writing contest.
About 18% new users, and 83% existing users, made at least one edit three months after the start date of the contests.[1] In this section you will find strategies to increase editor retention in your contest through effective promotion, tools to increase participant motivation, and strategies to welcome and support new editors.
• Promote: Choose the best promotion strategy to reach your target audience.
There are many ways that you can promote a contest. Your strategy will depend on the participant audience you want to reach and the partners you are working with. For best results, begin promotion at least one month before the contest begins, and plan to make a big announcement on the first day of the contest. In this section you will find tools for promoting your contest both on and off wiki.
“We started promoting two months before the contest because we were targeting students so that they could join the class and learn basic editing skills first. Timing is important. If you do promotion right before the contest it is too late, but if you do it too far in advance they will forget.” - WikiWomen
“One existing editor personally contacts potential new contributors and invites them to participate in contest. This works well since Estonia is small community.” - Kaarel
"We reach new communities by contacting new audience leaders, for example, sending a press release about a week before a contest to organizations who have a large following of people who might be interested in the topic."
• Motivate: How to get participants to edit early and edit often.
People who join contests tend to be competitive. Motivate these participants with scoreboards or progress updates. Less competitive people can be motivated by a simple 'thank you' or by increased attention to their on-wiki work. Check out the links below for tools and ideas to make your competition fun for everyone.
"Gamification or sense of competition drives people. Normally, I start writing and make myself a leader, this encourages people to follow. Then I stop and they pass me. I am like the rabbit in a greyhound race." - User:Kippelboy
"During the contest we use social media to send thank-you tweets to top contributors to encourage early participation. This gets re-tweeted and can go 'viral' in our small community. We publicly thank a lot to our top users." - User:Kippelboy
• Encourage: Welcome new editors to your community and encourage them to stay.
Contests are a great way to reach new editors and help them become part of your community. Many contest participants may have thought about editing Wikipedia before and decide to start because they hear about a contest on a topic they are very interested in. Once a new editor has joined a competition, they benefit from the increased attention to their work and from the increase in collaboration or camaraderie that comes with contests.
"I don't think there is a single person who doesn’t think of themselves as welcoming to new people, and there are a lot of people on Wikipedia who see that as the main goal of their work, to be welcoming to new people. But there are some people who are very strict and they go according to the rules, if they don't like something they erase it right away and they don't realize that this sort of attitude pushes people away from Wikipedia. During the competition, when a new users registers we can see everyone and we can see progress of the pages and if someone is mean to them we can see it and intervene." - PhysiWiki
Increase editor retention by creating newbie-friendly event pages and offering support and encouragement off-wiki.
When people contribute to Wikipedia, everyone wins! But it wouldn't be a contest if there weren't a winningist winner. Learn different ways you can recruit judges and determine the winner of your contest.
• Judging systems and logistics: Plan your judging process and hoe to manage challenges.
You probably came up with a strategy to judge your contest during the planning stage. Of course, things do not always go the way you planned them. In this section, you will find tips for how to manage judging processes. You can help expand judging resources by sharing strategies you have used when you encounter problems during the judging phase.
"Plan your judging system in advance, you shouldn’t feel stressed out by the volume of work." - User: Newyorkadam
Judging tools and tips: Learn how to manage judging processes and identify contest winners.
• Scoring rubrics: Choose a scoring system that works with your resources and goals.
Contests entries can be scored based on a variety of factors. Some systems are very simple and count only bytes, images, words or articles created. Others are more complex and may use tools or experts to assess the quality of contest submissions. It is best to determine how your contest will be scored in the planning phase, but ultimately having an effective system to collect scores is most important when judging a contest.
"Our scoring system has grown quite complex, because of people who gamed the system. We added in these rules to circumvent that. Even though it is quite complex, it is predefined and people know what it is. If I started a competition on a different Wikipedia, I would start with a simple scoring system, and just add on complexity as needed." - Lars
"Self-scoring systems make people feel active on the contest. Gets community engaged, encourages wikipedians to check each other’s and talk to each other, and try to beat each other." - User:Kippelboy
Scoring Systems: Explore scoring systems used by successful contests that measure quantity and quality.
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