Literature contest on Hungarian Wikipedia a success

After six weeks of fierce competition, the Hungarian literature article writing competition came to an end with 47 editors creating 127 new articles on writers, their works and other literature-related topics. The top contestants received prizes including an Amazon Kindle, gift vouchers and Wikipedia hoodies at the combined Wikipedian meetup and 4th birthday celebration of Wikimedia Hungary. The ceremony was held on 1 December in a Budapest restaurant. We were especially happy that the competition included the participation of 13 new editors and eight formerly inactive editors who returned to editing for the competition.
The contestants had the chance to enter any number of articles in the six-week period between 5 October and 20 November 2012. The articles were then rated on a scale of 0-10 in five categories by a four-member expert Wikipedian jury. The categories included “completeness of coverage,” “length,” “layout” and “quality and the importance of the topic.” In the end the editors were ranked based on the total number of points they collected with their entries.
The overall winner of the contest was the user nicknamed Tao Kai, who contributed 17 articles on Chinese literature, including entries covering individual authors and works, but also such hitherto sorely missed important articles like the one covering Chinese poetry. Special prizes were awarded to the best new user, Moni79, who contributed two good articles on the novels Bouvard et Pécuchet and Mrs. Dalloway. The award for best returning user was given to Nobli, who translated two articles on Dickens’ novels from the English Wikipedia. The jury especially praised Hkoala‘s entry on the Hungarian historical novel The Fanatics, which was the only article to receive a perfect score.
Overall, the organizers were pleased that the contest successfully attracted new editors and created quality articles of important Hungarian and World Literature topics. The contest proved to be the most successful of the series of competitions organized by the Hungarian chapter and aimed at improving content quality, creating new articles and attracting editors. It seems that a concentrated PR effort, community goodwill and help, an easily approachable topic and valuable prizes are good combinations to achieve wide participation and attract new editors.
Going forward, we will continue to experiment with the contest model, while also being open to trying other methods to attract new editors with specialized knowledge.
Bence Damokos, Wikimedia Hungary