I know that a lot of people are feeling restless and cooped up during the lockdown, and I thought that in order to possibly help alleviate that, and to help editors contribute to wikiHow, that I could revive the Bold Edit Contest
.
The goal of the contest would be that a contributor basically picks one (or more) article(s) that are in Quality Review, and then edits them to get them fully promoted. I was originally planning on having editors vote for which article they think was the best, but I thought that this might make some people feel bad, and it might hurt the collaborative spirit of a wiki, so I came up with a different idea. In this contest, there would be no winners or losers. Instead, every article that got promoted to fully published status would be listed in the “Hall of Fame”, and the contestants can put their submission up and say why they are proud of their work, and what they learned (either about wikiHow, or the topic the article was about) while improving the article. Additionally, other users can respond to the submissions and say why they like the improvement that the user did, and what they learned from the article. The initial submissions and responses would occur on the forums, and latter, all of the submissions would be moved to the Hall of Fame on a wikiHow: page. This should help reduce the amount of edits that would need to be patrolled.
The submission deadline would be something like June 30th, or a similar date, and after that, the articles and comments in the “Hall of Fame” would be enshrined on the page and archived on a page in the wikiHow: namespace so that everybody could be proud of and remember their achievement.
I thought that this somewhat different approach at the contest would highlight everybody’s contributions, and it would prevent a competitive atmosphere from forming that might be damaging to the community. Also, it would help people divert their energy into something productive, and it would help some articles get promoted. It would basically be like the community achievements of the week, but it would be community run, and users would be able to respond to individual article submissions.
Additionally, I think that some templates could be created/edited. I came across {{ Bold Edit Award
}}, which is not used on any page, and I think could be edited to say something like “I participated in the bold edit contest”. This could be added to participants user pages after the contest.
Also, I thought that discussion pages could perhaps have a template added to them that explains that the article was improved via the Bold Edit Contest. Discussion pages can only be seen by logged in contributors, so I think that this will make the contest more fun without affecting readers to much. Although this is just an idea, and is not required in order to have the contest.
I think that this is a good idea because everyone can participate, have fun, and have a good time. Also, even though anybody can edit articles in quality review at any time, this contest might help increase the amount of articles that are edited.
Since I do want to create some templates, and use discussion pages in the project, I wanted to see what everyone thought of my idea first before I proceeded with the contest. I also wanted to see if anybody had any suggestions or ideas in regards to the contest.
