Results for the March International writing contest are out:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/International_writing_contest
There were many great English submissions, and even though en: entered the contest on very short notice, some of our submissions ranked up there with the best articles in any language. The top six articles, each worthy of a long read :
1. Apollo 8 (Evil Monkey) [the clear winner, even before audio files were added] 2. Reformation in Switzerland (Lupo) 3. Spring Heeled Jack (Shauri) 4. Kreutz Sungrazers (Worldtraveller) 5. Oakland Cemetery (uberpenguin) 6. Automatic number plate recognition (violetriga)
Honorable mention goes to [[Diamond]], which underwent an incredible transformation over the course of the month, and will probably be featured by the end of the week. It was also the most collaborative effort submitted to the contest, worked on actively by Bantman, Jasper and Hadal. However, despite seeing every paragraph and section change, it was already a long and well-sourced article when the month began.
Congratulations to everyone who worked on these articles.
There will be another writing and media contest in May, for materials created primarily after April 30; hopefully with some good prizes in the mix. We are already seeing some innovative video contributions, and I hope there will be some good entries next month (if you haven't already, take a peek at this quick clip of Wikinews TV : http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Broadcast ).
If you are interested in judging either the writing or the media submissions; or if you would like to donate a prize for one of these contests, please leave a note on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Contests .
(NB: Both the English Wikinews writing contest and the German entries for this past International writing contest have attracted a few hundred dollars in prizes... )