Wikimedia Indonesia lightning talk on organizing contests: transcript

Key points

• Contests answer newcomers who ask whether they will be paid, since prizes act as a form of payment.
• Contests give workshop participants a fun way to apply what they learned.
• Contests can steer contributors from celebrity and soap drama topics toward STEM and humanities.
• Photo contests are simplest because international organizers handle the technical parts and locals handle registration and prizes.
• Wiktionary contests are easy to run, while Wikisource and Wikidata edit-a-thons are hard to count edits for.
• Spoken Wikipedia contests are hard to check, and Wikibooks contests work for cookbooks but not fiction.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introducing Wikimedia Indonesia's contest experience
2. 0:35Why organize contests
3. 1:42Photography contests and Commons campaigns
4. 2:56Wikipedia edit-a-thons and Wiktionary contests
5. 4:01Audio and Wikibooks contests to avoid or try

Full transcript

0:00And let's welcome on the other side, Dimas from Indonesia. Okay, so hello everyone. My name is Dimas. I'm from Wikimedia Indonesia. We already test some of the contests. We already organized some contests from Wikipedia and photo contests to less visible Wikimedia projects such as Wiktionary and also Wikibooks. So, I want to share which projects which may be suitable for the first-time organizers for the contest.

0:35So, one of the first questions is why we are organizing a contest. So, the first reason is in every workshop, there will be one person, always, there will be one person who asking, Will I get paid for contributions? Will I get paid because I'm uploading the photos or contributing to articles? So, well, the answer is actually yes, but actually no.

1:06Because, well, join our contest and maybe you will get prices and it's just like a form of payment. So, perhaps the Indonesians are not... Unfamiliar with voluntarism. And the second one is, it's a fun way as the newcomers or the workshop participants who want to learning or to apply what they got during the workshops. So it's a pretty fun way because they can be applied what they got in the workshops and also maybe they get prices.

1:42And the third one, the last one, is most of the Indonesian contributors are mostly contributing on the celebs or a thousand episodes of our soap drama. But what about the STEM topics or humanities? So the context is actually can be used to equalize the quality content from the hard sciences like STEM or humanities. Okay, for the first one is the photography contest. It's actually the simple ones because the affiliates or user group, you can just write your affiliates and user groups to the list of the participants, and you can localize the landing page and let the international organizers do the most difficult and technical parts like submitted the Photos like using Campaign on the Wikimedia Commons and that's it. So the local organizer will just organize the participants' registrations and also maybe the prizes. That's it.

2:56On the second one is the Wikipedia edit-a-thon. It's actually a bit simple but it's a bit complicated than the Wikimedia Commons ones because you need to customize the criteria of the articles or the topics. etc. So it can may be used to create the topics which is not regularly edited by the contributors like human rights or climate changes. You may need using several tools like Fontaine or Autoridge dashboard to counting the edits of the participants contributions. And the third one is the dictionary. It's surprisingly easy because what you need to do just consider is just interest criteria which is only definitions and example sentences. That's it. So it's pretty easy for the newcomers or for the beginners organizers. Wikisource and Wikidata editathon is maybe pretty simple to contribute as the participants, but for the organizer it may be a bit difficult

4:01to counting all the edits because there are many edits from the participants will coming. And the audio contest, please don't write this one, really, because we are trying to create the spoken Wikipedia contest, but, well, it's really hard to check the recording of the participants because, well, the article is long and you need to ensure that all the recordings are correct. So, please don't try that, really. But if you want to create the contest with pronunciation of the words on Wiktionary, it's okay.

4:34Maybe it may be workable and it may be more easy. And the last one is Wikibooks. Okay, you can try the Wikibooks contest with creating the cookbooks or maybe some of the manuals. But please don't try the fiction ones because it's many substandard works. So, we don't recommend to create on the fiction works, but for the cookbook, it's okay. So, try to organize more manageable competition first. It's okay if the number of the participants is below target.

5:06At least there's a new card. Thank you. Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - Contests 101. Wikimedia Indonesia experiences organizing unique competitions.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.