Strategic Planning

Proposal:Run an annual prize for best featured content

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The status of this proposal is:
This is a draft document. Please feel free to make edits, and understand that content may substantively change. If appropriate, discuss at Proposal talk:Run an annual prize for best featured content.



This is a featured proposal.
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Summary

Create an honorary prize (say gold, silver, bronze medals) for significant and scholarly contributions to wikipedia. And be unapologetically elitist about it.

Proposal

An annual prize for substantial contributions to wikipedia that would promote the highest standards of scholarship. The prize would be honorary rather than financial, and would be awarded to individuals (not groups) who have created or significantly rewritten, say, 20+ articles on a single subject, giving breadth and depth to the topic.

Motivation

It will be a lasting reward for individual application and merit, will reward expertise without stifling other editor's contributions, will promote depth and detail in the given subjects and might help dispel wikipedia's (wholly unfounded!) reputation for shallowness and triviality. I believe something like this already happens on German wikipedia, but I don't know the details of that and wouldn't necessarily propose it as a model for what I'm suggesting here.

Key Questions

Who would administer and judge it? What would be the eligibility criteria?

  • One possibility would be to get a panel of academics and literary critics to review the Featured Articles for the year and award prizes to the best.

Potential Costs

Striking the medals, admin, publicity, other costs, possibly could be done in the low tens of thousands of dollars per annum, maybe funded by sponsorship or donation or by endowment.

References

Showing Zedler medaille
  • de:Wikipedia:Zedler-Medaille I had in mind something more like the Zedler Prize. Having external judges (external to wikipedia that is) would be essential for its credibility, IMO. So university or foundation support would be a requirement, even if the money came from elsewhere. See picture to the right.
  • en:CUP on the English Wikipedia there is an annual Cup for content contributors. So far it is internally judged and somewhat quantity orientated
  • en:wp:Featured Articles The Featured article process runs on several projects and gives honorary awards to the primary contributors of Featured content. It would be relatively easy to get a group of external academics to choose the best Featured article of the year, I'm not convinced that would add to its credibility, but it could be externally judged.


See also

Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Run an annual prize for best featured content.

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. – VisionHolder « talk » 02:29, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
  2. -- --Gaeser 07:06, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
  3. -- --General Ludd 14:35, 7 July 2010 (UTC)
  4. -- --minhhuy*= (talk) 14:28, 22 August 2010 (UTC)
  5. Randomran 14:11, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
  6. –SJ+ 00:11, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
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