The Umepedia Challenge has now come to an end and we are extremely happy with the results! The contest took place between May 1-31 and has been focusing on creating (initially) forty Wikipedia articles about the Swedish city of Umeå in as many languages as possible. These forty articles have been expanded over the last year by a group of Swedish volunteers and translated into English in the weeks before the contest.
Based on other previous online contests we had set our hopes low with only 25 contributions, but this was reached and surpassed on the very first day of the Challenge! As I am writing this (May 27) we have a stunning 551 contributions by 37 participants! It’s also great to see that 11 languages now have all 40 articles available, making them an excellent source of information about the city of Umeå. We are blown away by this! Because so many languages already had all of the 40 articles created, we decided, 20 days into the contest, to add six more bonus articles. We want to sincerely thank all of you for the hard work on Wikipedia and for spreading information about the contest (and to Amical Wikimedia for the idea of using the simple and elegant WLM design in online writing contests) and to Wikimedia CH for sponsoring a number of special prizes!
So why did we limit ourselves to 40 (+6) articles? Well, the idea was that we wanted to focus the efforts and make it possible for the participants to see how much work was left. During the year we will place signs with “QRpedia codes” next to these 40 historically and culturally important places in Umeå (which is currently the European Capital of Culture). You might already know this, but a QRpedia code is a smart form of a Quick Response (QR) code, which automatically identifies what language you are using on your phone and directs you to the right language version on Wikipedia, so that you can read the article in your native tongue. This is an excellent way for immigrants, international students and tourists to enjoy and learn more about the city. Having all of these articles ready will make it easier for us to come to an agreement with the house owners to put signs on their buildings, so in that sense, the volunteer effort is extremely valuable.
One problem is, for example, that tourists have to pay a lot for the roaming charges, but luckily Umeå already has a city-wide Wifi network that is free to use for 15 minutes per day. On top of the 40 places, we also have QRpedia codes in the exhibits in Guitars – the Museum, connected to famous musicians. Perhaps our next challenge will include these, and Umepedia Challenge 2.0 will surely include other important articles that will support the 40 Umepedia Challenge articles in order to give them more depth. In future contests we will also do our best to improve the point system further to make it even more fair, while keeping it fun and easy.
For anyone interested in organizing translation challenges in the future please feel free to use the handy tool that we developed, where the number of languages an article has been translated into can be counted using calls to the Wikidata API.
The winners of the main prizes in the Challenge are:
- 1st: User:Satdeep gill = 828 points
- 2nd: User:Artificial123 = 763 points
- 3rd: User:ANKAN GHOSH DASTIDER = 710 points
- 4th: User:Semso98 = 574 points
- 5th: User:DirkVE = 526 points
- 6th: User:Stryn = 396 points
Congratulations to all of you!
Warm regards,
John Andersson, Project Manager, Wikimedia Sverige. John.Andersson@wikimedia.se
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