"Thing is, it's fairly difficult to bring an article to "featured" status on the English Wikipedia. It takes a lot of time and review to push the article candidate through the larger and frequently melodramatic English review community. However, on some other less-traveled Wikipedia language versions, getting content to the featured level is relatively easy. So, while the museum probably expected that its five $140 prizes would be going to articles written in English, two of the actual winning articles were authored in Catalan, another in Spanish, another in Latin, and only one in English. To give you an idea of comparative traffic statistics, the English Wikipedia garners over 7 million page views per hour (or, almost every person over the age of 5 in metropolitan Chicago could each view one page). The Latin Wikipedia captures the attention of fewer than two thousand page views hourly (or, the population of the town of Helper, Utah). The winning Latin featured article about the British Museum's Rosetta Stone artifact received only about 14 page views a day over the past ten days. (Compare the traffic on the English Wikipedia's article about the Rosetta Stone: 24,300 page views per day.) One of the winning articles in the Catalan language gets only 12 page views daily.
Imagine paying $140 to a copywriter for content that will get 12 or 14 page views per day. It may be the British Museum's worst pay-per-impression deal on the Internet ever."
'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views' http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museu...
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 5:34 AM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museu...
Thanks for the link. I had read that article previously and thought it was fairly interesting while getting a few points not quite right.
I agree that having a featured article in Latin seems a bit pointless, but it is actually useful as a quirky point to publicise the fact that we have such language wikis. If I was giving advice to anyone thinking of running a similar competition, specifying or excluding languages would be one option, or requiring that the entrants be from a range of languages (or require the articles to be translated into at least one other language after gaining featured status, and all to be translated into English unless there is already an existing article).
I do regret not being in the country at the time of the British Museum meeetup, and I hope they do another one.
Carcharoth
Gwern Branwen wrote:
'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views' http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museu...
I decided to ignore the whole "prizes" aspect of the BM residency. That's a snarky piece, really, and there is no need for me to add to the snarkiness. But the idea of a wiki is collaboration, and any prizes that ignore that an article is developed by a team (how exactly do you divide up a £100 book prize among those who get an article to FA?) are basically misconceived.
Charles
On 27 Jul 2010, at 09:15, Charles Matthews wrote:
Gwern Branwen wrote:
'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views' http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museu...
I decided to ignore the whole "prizes" aspect of the BM residency. That's a snarky piece, really, and there is no need for me to add to the snarkiness. But the idea of a wiki is collaboration, and any prizes that ignore that an article is developed by a team (how exactly do you divide up a £100 book prize among those who get an article to FA?) are basically misconceived.
Um ... £100 / (number of people involved)? or using a weighted distribution? Seems fairly easy to me, and definitely a lot easier than dividing up a specific prize (e.g. a book worth £100).
Mike (Leaving aside that it's a general voucher, not book-specific.)
Michael Peel wrote:
On 27 Jul 2010, at 09:15, Charles Matthews wrote:
Gwern Branwen wrote:
'British Museum pays for Wikipedia page views' http://www.examiner.com/x-58002-Wiki-Edits-Examiner~y2010m7d26-British-Museu...
I decided to ignore the whole "prizes" aspect of the BM residency. That's a snarky piece, really, and there is no need for me to add to the snarkiness. But the idea of a wiki is collaboration, and any prizes that ignore that an article is developed by a team (how exactly do you divide up a £100 book prize among those who get an article to FA?) are basically misconceived.
Um ... £100 / (number of people involved)? or using a weighted distribution? Seems fairly easy to me, and definitely a lot easier than dividing up a specific prize (e.g. a book worth £100).
Mike (Leaving aside that it's a general voucher, not book-specific.)
So, [[Hoxne Hoard]] (not FA yet, might have been a contender), you'd comb through well over 1000 edits, parcel out credit for substantive edits, factor in photo credits, give some sort of reward for those to were constructive on the Talk page, I hope, rather than plunging in with additions that others had to sort out? I'm sure there would be no arguments at all from people awarded £2 for work they thought was worth at least £3.
The fact is that the underlying assumption was of a single-minded editor who'd be motivated by a prize to put in time to create an FA pretty much from scratch. Not our model of collaboration.
Charles
On 27 Jul 2010, at 10:13, Charles Matthews wrote:
So, [[Hoxne Hoard]] (not FA yet, might have been a contender), you'd comb through well over 1000 edits, parcel out credit for substantive edits, factor in photo credits, give some sort of reward for those to were constructive on the Talk page, I hope, rather than plunging in with additions that others had to sort out? I'm sure there would be no arguments at all from people awarded £2 for work they thought was worth at least £3.
The fact is that the underlying assumption was of a single-minded editor who'd be motivated by a prize to put in time to create an FA pretty much from scratch. Not our model of collaboration.
That is closer to the ideal collaboration than is achieved with most FAs, though. My understanding was that most FAs were either driven by a single individual, or a fairly well defined group of people - those that are actively driving the article forward until it reaches FA, rather than making smaller incremental edits or leaving constructive comments/feedback/reviewing the article. In academia, these would be the first set of author names on a paper from a big collaboration. It would be that group of people that would divide out the prize amongst them.*
In this specific case, although I contributed a number of photos for [[Hoxne Hoard]], I would not count myself as part of the collaboration that got it to FA status, and hence wouldn't have expected to share in any reward.
Mike
* It would be an interesting study to see (statistically) how many people contribute to an FA significantly, and how much work of the work is done by smaller edits (and also looking at the broader methodology and motivation behind constructing FAs). Has this been done anywhere?
On 27 July 2010 10:02, Michael Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
I decided to ignore the whole "prizes" aspect of the BM residency. That's a snarky piece, really, and there is no need for me to add to the snarkiness. But the idea of a wiki is collaboration, and any prizes that ignore that an article is developed by a team (how exactly do you divide up a £100 book prize among those who get an article to FA?) are basically misconceived.
Um ... £100 / (number of people involved)? or using a weighted distribution? Seems fairly easy to me, and definitely a lot easier than dividing up a specific prize (e.g. a book worth £100).
Who counts as involved? What do you weight the distribution by? Number of edits is useless, number of words isn't much better.