Wikipedia talk:Stub Contest/2013 archive

List of stub articles

OK, so all discussion goes here - for some clues as stubs to expand, I am thinking of the following:

• Refreshing the list at Wikipedia:Most wanted stubs - i.e. the most-linked ones.

• Creating a list of most viewed articles that are currently labelled as stubs -could be placed on the same page as above.

All other ideas welcome. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:26, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Minor comments

Overall, I really like the idea - there are still an unfortunate number of high-importance articles that are still in horribly stubby condition. One thing I'm not sure of is the statement "The only prerequisite is that an article has a stub tag at the beginning". There are many stubs out there that don't have tags, and removing these from consideration would be a dis-service, I think. For example, Cumberland Mountains is obviously stubby, is rated stub-class by all of the projects on the talk page, but doesn't have a stub tag.

I like your ideas above for getting lists of articles. Perhaps User:West.andrew.g (who runs User:West.andrew.g/Popular_pages and all of the by-project popular pages like Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Popular pages) could be of help? If we did a "most viewed" list, though, I hope we could average the views over a longer time-span, to get rid of the spikes driven by TV show premiers, actresses who got caught naked, etc. Dana boomer (talk) 18:26, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Another tool is the Wikipedia Release Version Tool that allows sorting of stubs based on a "Score" that amalgamates average page-views (over several months), incoming wikilinks, interlanguage links and WikiProject importance rating.--ELEKHH^T 21:43, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm, I really like that - I'd forgotten you could use that tool to give you a "score". At 1200 points (where you originally had it set) it gave a total of 878 stub articles. However, these include quite a few duplicates, and quite a few articles where the ratings are out of date (I found maybe 25% in just the first few clicks on articles, so they do exist). Best guess, maybe 500 viable articles? This sounds like a decent number to choose from to me; do others have other opinions? A request that people focus on true stubs, combined with brownie points for re-assessing non-stubs sounds like a good combination to me. The judges can obviously see what the initial state of the article was, so as long as people are aware that more stubby articles = more bonus points, there shouldn't be a problem with that. Two birds, one stone - a bunch of articles improved and a bunch more reassessed to a more accurate rating level. Dana boomer (talk) 22:19, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Sounds great - will outline some possible scoring below. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:11, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Hmm. I like this idea! I will definitely participate, and as implied by the newsletter that just went out, this could even tie into the WikiCup in an unofficial way, given most articles in this competition would qualify for DYK, and therefore Cup points too! Fair warning in advance though... I hope you enjoy reading hockey biographies.  ;) Resolute 01:31, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Pseudostubs

I like the idea. I think the sheer number of "pseudostubs" - articles with stub tags but which aren't stubs by any reasonable definition - might cause some stress in repeatedly having to define edge cases. (I've long suspected that perhaps 25% of articles marked as stubs aren't)

Perhaps add a raw cut-off - "the article should be marked as a stub and should be under 1500/2000/2500 characters? You'll lose some legitimate stubs (articles padded out by meaningless empty lists, dummy infoboxes, etc) but also have a nice clear line to work with. Andrew Gray (talk) 19:14, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

I agree that the criteria for participation shouldn't be the stub-tag as many stubs are not tagged, while the WikiProject rating is also not a perfect indicator because many non-stub articles are still rated as stubs (2.4 million articles assessed as stubs). But arbitrary character count is also problematic. Best IMO is to use the Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Assessment definition. --ELEKHH^T 21:43, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Possible scoring

Alright - been thinking about this....maybe:

• 10 points for expanding a stub to a minimum of 1500 b "readable prose size" (like DYK)
• +10 points for a stub on Wikipedia Release Version Tool - or maybe loosen it a bit to 1000 points to get a bigger variety.
• 1 point for re-rating an article incorrectly labelled as a stub
• 5 points for a particularly funny or valuable expansion (judges' discretion - examples might be some article which is from a particularly poorly-represented area of the wiki, medical, humorous...dunno)

Other ideas? 02:11, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

I think the idea of a small number of points simply for removing the tag or re-rating is an excellent idea (perhaps note that both the article tag should be removed and the talkpage assessment, if both are present?) This is one of our really long-standing maintenance gaps, and it'd be a good way to encourage cleaning it up. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:30, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

May I suggest that moving stubs to DYK, GA, and FA should make the editor handsomely rewarded, like in the other contest? Maybe points for adding infoboxes to articles that need them? Points for removing disambiguation links? Points for making it spelling error free? Points for categorising the article? Points for adding it to Wikiprojects? (A small amount of points, mind you - but everything should be counted, big or small).--Coin945 (talk) 14:17, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

I've been thinking about this post since I saw it earlier this morning, and I have to say that I can't agree that "everything should be counted". A contest will get more done if it focuses on a specific task: in this case, upgrading stubs, either through improvement or through changing the assessment if the article has been previously improved. Categorization and adding wikiprojects is really open to gaming, spelling is hard to check, and prompting the adding of infoboxes on a large scale is just asking for trouble given the recent ArbCom case. While all of the above are good things, when done correctly, I don't think they're something that we need to bulk up the point scale with. The original scale, proposed by Cas, is simple, easy to remember and judge, and except for the last point, completely objective. We don't need to pack every possible cleanup task into one competition. As a note, there is already a month dab-removal competition run through the DabSolver app, and some of the larger WikiProjects run occasionally assessment/improvement drives on articles within their purview. Maybe those are also things that should be advertised more...although that is out of the scope of this talk page. Dana boomer (talk) 17:53, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Have to agree with Dana here, keeping it simple is what I had in mind....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:20, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Thankyou for your thoughtful critique of my idea. I did think the logistics of checking it all, and specific cases where they don't apply would put a dent into it. Nevertheless, there's nothing wrong with throwing stuff at a wall and seeing what sticks. That's how the best think-tanks are run. :)--Coin945 (talk) 19:46, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

We could also use the Special:WantedPages page to find the articles that, theoretically anyways, are needed that most.--Coin945 (talk) 12:11, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

• For stub removal, should we note that this should be talk-page rerating and removing the stub tag if both are applicable? May as well get people to solve both problems at once. (You might also want to mention the excellently useful script at User:Kephir/gadgets/rater). Andrew Gray (talk) 21:24, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes that is a very good idea. Will do. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:21, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Length

Why a month? This could run for a much shorter time, even a weekend, & it might be better to start that way. For a short period, the timing could be flexible, but only edis made over a period of say 72 hours would count - it doesn't have to be the same 72 hours for each contestant. A week might also be a good length. Then keen people don't get so tired. Johnbod (talk) 03:38, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Hadn't thought of that - just thinking like the Core Contest but no reason why it can't be shorter. Shorter sounds reasonable.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:41, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Shorter would be OK for this, although I think a weekend is a little too short. A week would probably be a good length...maybe two at max? Dana boomer (talk) 12:30, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Fortnight sounds good to me :) --ELEKHH^T 12:43, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

One or two weeks sounds good. I'm in. When are you thinking of running this? Schwede66 06:38, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Soon - gotta hit the WMUK for a microgrant proposal for some amazon vouchers as prizes first. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:24, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Can IPs participate?

Kudos to Cas for setting this up. Around this time last year (2012), I was going to make a proposal at VPR that enwp set a goal for 2013 of having more Start class articles than Stubs. But since proposals from IPs never go anywhere, I didn't bother, Perhaps a well-respected FA writer and former Arb could propose this as a goal for 2014 (hint, hint).

What I decided to do instead was to set a 2013 goal for myself to review 1,000 stubs and reassess those that had been improved. This quickly changed to reviewing 5,000—10,000 stubs and reassessing 1,000. I'm currently just under 900 for the year, so I'll easily make 1,000 by the end of the year. Maybe my example will encourage others.

I don't want Amazon vouchers, but I wouldn't mind getting some brownie points. Can dynamic IPs participate? Thanks. 64.40.54.190 (talk) 17:31, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Err, I guess - if you're a dynamic IP why not make a throwaway account for the duration of the contest so it makes it easier? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:16, 19 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer. I'll retract the question. 64.40.54.166 (talk) 00:40, 20 October 2013 (UTC)

"Funny" expansion?

What does *this* mean exactly..?

Humorous - if I chuckle (particularly out loud) while reading it. It does happen. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 18:43, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

I thought encyclopedic content and humorous content was mutually exclusive... but I cant wait to see what you give points too. :D--Coin945 (talk) 10:24, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Disambiguation pages count as stubs?

Many disambiguation page lists are actually very basic stubs, whose topics are in desperate need of expansion. For this reason I request that the articles listed in Category:Disambiguation pages to be converted to broad concept articles also be included in the competition.--Coin945 (talk) 15:51, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

How would you expand a "dab" page? The normal standard is that such a page has at most one line or one sentence about each topic, and it only expands if there are many topics that should be listed. Now the pages to which a dab page links might well be stubs, but then they are ordinary stubs no different from any others, as I see it. Or have I somehow misunderstood your suggestion? Now if a dab page is converted from a dab page to a general article on the topic, then yes I would think that should count. DES ^(talk) 16:47, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Oh to display (not use) a category precede the link with a colon, or use {{cat}}. Now i see why I didn't see the category when I first read this section. DES ^(talk) 16:48, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

Ok - I can see (for example) Little Portugal, which is essentially a stub and would benefit from a section on basic definition. Okay, I like this idea, either these are expanded or someone reviews them and concludes that the tag is in error. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 18:50, 23 October 2013 (UTC)

TBH Little India isn't actually that good of an example. I'm talking about articles such as Imperialism in Asia, Coins of China, Decriminalization of marijuana, Demographics of South Asia, Animal killing (sacrifice, slaughter, & euthanasia are 3 VERY different reasons), Ancient Europe, War of succession, [[Throat singing], Tales from the Crypt (structured as a franchise article), Skull and crossbones (article about the symbol itself - with various uses as subheadings), and Federal court.... among others. These articles can easily be expanded, and the items in the list would make very nice subheadings.--Coin945 (talk) 10:31, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

Now approved...ready to go... Comment

Right folks - the microgrants scheme approval has meant we can dish out some Amazon vouchers for prizes. We will run this over four weeks from December 1st to December 31st (allow a few extra days for Xmas, so 1 month ;)) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:54, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Right - anyone want to help me co-judge this thing - all that is required is a sense of humour. Also, anyone good at formatting and making this contest look pretty? Pages are a bit dry....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:10, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

NB:If anyone sees any glaring glitches or ambiguities in scoring....let me know before Dec 1! Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:26, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

One suggestion on the "honorable mention" prizes - perhaps give one or two out on a random draw of anyone who participates (also, perhaps, one entry to such a draw for each stub expanded). Gives anyone who participates a chance at the carrot rather than just the most dedicated. (But don't forget to ask a skill testing question of any Canadian who wins such a prize.  ;) )

Also, would there be enough time to get a bot task set up to handle scoring pages, like the WikiCup? Something that could automatically check the expansion, release tool bonus and project rating bonus? Would make the game easier to judge overall. Also, to prevent gaming, the project rating bonus should be if the article is rated high/top as of December 1. Resolute 14:56, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Casliber: I've begun tweaking the scoring page so that it looks better. Feel free to revert any changes you don't want. I also signed up. I would, however, like to add my name to the growing list that look at "+5 points for a particularly funny or valuable expansion (judges' discretion - examples might be some article which is from a particularly poorly-represented area of the wiki, medical, humorous...dunno)" with skepticism. If you want to reward one category of articles (like medical) above others, that's fine, but it needs to be laid out ahead of time, so that everything appears fair. In terms of bonuses, I'd be much more comfortable with that line removed entirely, and perhaps replaced with something that's more easy to quantify, like "+5 points for expanding a stub to a minimum of 3000 b "readable prose size", with an additional +5 for expanding to 4500 b". Sven Manguard Wha? 19:27, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Awww, you're all spoilsports Sigh - that seems to have gone down like a lead balloon. Okay, will ditch it and add something. Given that length per se is possibly not what we should be aiming for, I'll change it to GA status. actually strike that last bit, the main aim is for folks to chew through stubs really, but a bit of extra oomph is ok with 5 points for 3000 b. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:01, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, they may have spoiled the points party, but nothing says that you, or any participant, can't award barnstars for expansions that make one laugh! Resolute 20:27, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

(ec w/Resolute) Can we go higher than 3000 b prose for the bonus? For example, Equus Survival Trust is 3018 b readable prose size, and it's...tiny. If we're going to be giving bonuses to people for writing four paragraphs of prose, we might as well just give 15 base points for every stub. 4500 or even 5000 b would probably be better, given that Rembrandt (horse) is 4656 b and is still a bit short for a GA. Bonuses should be something you have to work a little harder to attain, not something that is almost automatic if the article has truly been expanded beyond stub-size. Dana boomer (talk) 20:31, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Good point. the emphasis should be on the making stubs really....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:23, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Update - have adjusted large page bonus. also note two bonus prizes :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:26, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Query: has any thought been given to awarding bonus points for DYKs? Bringing stubs to DYK just seems like a natural progression, seeing as how many of the contest's rules align with that area. Thoughts? Ruby 2010/2013 16:03, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

An obvious problem with DYK is that we may have to wait six weeks or so until all the nominations have been dealt with before we can finalise judging. Yes, this and DYK are obviously aligned, but it would make things much more complex to administer. Schwede66 18:25, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

• I would offer to help ajudicate, but I won't have any free time until about 10th January! Apologies. I can run up some toolserver worklists of "large stub articles by subject", though, if those would be helpful. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:58, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Spelling out prize amounts would be a good idea

Not to be mercenary (I doubt I'll be participating, though I think this is a great idea), but - spelling out the prize amounts (with 250 euros to distribute) would, I think, be very motivating to potential contestants. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:33, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

Alright - first of all, I figured stub-hunting for the oldest or most highly-viewed stubs could be separate prizes, but I guess they could just be bonus points and wrapped into points total - how do folks feel - strong opinion either way? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:22, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

I think it would be cool to have these as separate prizes. Maybe something like $100 for first, $50 for second, $25 each for third, fourth, oldest and most viewed? That would give six different prizes, and give people plenty of ways that they could focus their own personal stub drive ("ok, so am I going to go for pure numbers, or for less articles with more bonus points, or am I just going to aim to find the oldest stub that I can, or...") and I'm sure every person will do it differently. An easy way to find the oldest/most-viewed article could be to have each entrant mark their own personal top articles in these categories, and then the judge(s) would only have to look at one article for each entrant to find the winner in these categories. Dana boomer (talk) 20:52, 16 November 2013 (UTC)

That was my rough thinking for Core Contest - so 100 euro for first, 50 for 2nd, 25 for 3rd & 4th, 25 for oldest stub and 25 for highest-viewed on Dec 1...yeah, ok. Think I'll run with these unless anyone presents a strong case for an alternative. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 05:18, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

• How will the oldest Stub upgraded be identified? Snowman (talk) 12:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

"run over two weeks"

Should the first paragraph say "run over a month" considering it says 1st-31st above? If not can someone explain because I'm confused! Samwalton9 (talk) 23:06, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

I have edited the lead; have another look. Schwede66 23:36, 17 November 2013 (UTC)

Thanks folks - uno montho it is. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 09:01, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Questions

• Are Altamira Oriole and Common Rosefinch Stub or Start? I would be reluctant to rate them as Start because most of the text is not referenced. If someone changed the rating in the WP banners to a Start class and removed the Stub template on the articles, would one point be awarded for each article for only doing this? Snowman (talk) 20:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

I've reassessed the first one as start, the other one is still a stub. If in doubt, go by the DYK rule of thumb of 1500 bytes of prose for an article to no longer be a stub. See also Wikipedia:Stub. Schwede66 21:31, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

• Sometimes an article has two or more WP banners on the talk page. If it has three and only one of them rates the article as a Stub, is it classed as a Stub or a Start? Snowman (talk) 20:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

The article should be the same rank across all the banners, and should be assessed as per assessment guidelines. I would rate both as Start according to Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Assessment_FAQ#Quality_scale as:

The article has a usable amount of good content but is weak in many areas, usually in referencing. Quality of the prose may be distinctly unencyclopedic, and MoS compliance non-existent; but the article should satisfy fundamental content policies, such as notability and BLP, and provide enough sources to establish verifiability. No Start-Class article should be in any danger of being speedily deleted

The Rosefinch article has basic info on what it looks like and where it is found - when I think "stub" I think generally 1-3 sentences and really meagre information. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:33, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

If people can not agree what a stub is, then I presume that there might be some disagreements about the scoring. Snowman (talk) 10:01, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, which is why the contest has judge(s) and people don't just score themselves. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I would say there's no question either of those is a start. B would require sourcing throughout; Start just requires that it has more than minimal content and structure. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

• If an article with the features of a Start article had three WP banners, two at Start and one at Stub, and a Stub template on the article, then would the competitor get a point for updating the remaining WP banner from the talk page and removing the Stub template from the article? Presumably, the competitor would have helped to update the Wiki, as much as if the article only had one Stub WP banner on the talk page. Snowman (talk) 09:58, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I would answer "yes" to that, as it would still (incorrectly) be coming up on stub lists beforehand. Hence this is a net benefit in idenitifying and weeding out not-stubs. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:07, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Of course, some talk pages do not have a WP banner, so I assume an upgrade that included the addition of a Start-class WP banner will also be given one point, if the article looked like a Start, but had kept is Stub template. Snowman (talk) 14:23, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• I understand that competitors submit a diffs of expanded articles for adjudication. However, I am not so sure how Stubs that were found to require an immediate upgrade are submitted. Here surly, it would be over-the-top submitting a diff of the small changes needed on both the article and the talk page. Alternatively, would the competitor simply submit the proposed Stub that needed an immediate upgrade for the adjudicators to re-rate the article and talk page where relevant. Snowman (talk) 13:41, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• Why would it be over the top to submit a diff of changes to the article/talk page when re-rating? It's just a quick copy and paste...a few clicks and a minute of work at the most. I think that submitting proposed re-ratings for the judges to perform goes against the whole purpose of this contest, which is to have the competitors do the work and the judges make any hard calls. Dana boomer (talk) 14:37, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• I was simply asking how it would work and now I think that it would be unreasonable to expect the judges to change the stub template and the WP banner. Submitting diffs would amount one minute of work (or longer) for each Stub upgrade and this is just to get one point and perhaps 10 mins (or longer) to get 10 points by adding lots of diffs (two for each Stub submitted - one on the article and one on the article talk page). Each diff to an article would show that the Stub template had been removed and each diff to the talk page would show that the WP banner had been updated. Surely, if the edit summary is adequate on both the article and article talk page, then the simple re-rating edits would not need to be highlighted any further. If a Stub was expanded with a series of edits, then I think that the diff of the edits to the article should be submitted. I am not clear on what is expected when submitting Stubs that had an immediate upgrade. If diffs are needed, then as long as it is clear what to do, then I expect competitors will comply. Snowman (talk) 15:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• A diff should be compulsory - have pity on the judge looking at 400 entries or more. I think even a small expansion to a large stub is worthwhile, especially with inline references added. It all goes towards reducing the numbers of stubs and increasing average article size and referencing. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:54, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• The reply is in the singular, so does this mean one diff per updated stub? If one diff is needed, what edit or edits should the diff specify? If both the WP banner on the talk page and the stub template on the article are both updated, then are two diffs needed? Snowman (talk) 14:51, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

• Is there a tool that can check page sizes on-wiki? I think there used to be but I haven't had it for months. If not I can just copy-paste to a word processor, but I figure that would be quicker at least. Wizardman 17:13, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
  • There is (or at least I have one), but I am not sure where I originally obtained it. To shows up at the bottom of my "Tools" menu on any page. I want to say I found it at DYK, but it was a long time ago. Canada Hky (talk) 20:05, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
    • Is this it at User:Dr_pda/prosesize? Snowman (talk) 20:20, 23 November 2013 (UTC)
      • That is the one I have, yes. I find it works well. Canada Hky (talk) 20:23, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• Would one point be awarded for changing a list wrongly tagged with a stub template on the list page and a stub WP banner on the talk page, like this one I amended today; List of reptiles of Morocco? Of course, in this case the WP banner was fixed by changing it to a List class. Snowman (talk) 20:03, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• The rules state that a stub should be expanded to at least 1500 b. Do you want to adopt the DYK rule that this should be a five-fold expansion (or perhaps a three-fold expansion)? Much more effort is required to raise a single sentence stub to 1500 b than to improve one already at 1000 b. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 07:09, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

On further thoughts, it would be easy to incorporate into the rules that the expansion must involve the addition of at least 1000 b of extra material. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 09:29, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

My thinking is two ways on this - in some ways I am happy if a largish stub is expanded just a little and reffed, as this means more sizeable material is reffed and reviewed. Furthermore if this means that more stubs are converted into starts and/or C class articles, all the better, as we're looking to reduce total stub numbers and convert as many as possible into higher class articles. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:56, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

• New question: If a stub is not able to be expanded, and the text of that article is merged into another (such as a list of characters), does that count as a stub article that was taken care of (10 points), or just a re-rating (1 point)? And for that matter, if an article is already a redirect, but the talk page was not updated, I assume that we can receive points as well for simply updating a stub article as Redirect-class. Fortdj33 (talk) 17:05, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that merging should be classed as a re-rating as it shouldn't take much more work than that does in my opinion. I've assumed that updating from stub to not-applicable is points worthy too, but I guess that's up to the judges. Samwalton9 (talk) 17:59, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Last minute proposals

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Closing this so we just clarify the rules before starting. I just threw up these ideas but the two second ones have some fiddly bits that impact on point scoring in a way that might prove a headache to review. Anyway. let's focus on starting in a day's time. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:51, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

---

I have been thinking more about this and wanted to gain some input before deciding one way of the other - so would like some feedback on the following. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:42, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Is 1 point for reassessing an article appropriate?

I suppose this should be mainly about content but it is really important to review the vast numbers of articles listed as stubs and rerate. But have we got the balance right?

Yes

1. Keep at one point per one immediate Stub upgrade. Snowman (talk) 10:14, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
2. Keep at one point. A good effort to points ratio. Dana boomer (talk) 13:53, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
3. One point is good. If the goal is to reduce stubs, this is an important avenue as well. Canada Hky (talk) 02:55, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

No, reduce points for regrading to 0.5 per article

1. I've gone on assessment runs where I re-assessed 50 articles in a couple hours. Yet, if I want to do a decent expansion, I might only do one article in the same time. So from that perspective, yes, and I'd prefer a smaller reward for reassessment. OTOH, if we award bonuses for larger articles, this mitigates this somewhat. Resolute 00:56, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Presumably, votes listed here should be quite a short comment. It sounds to me that part of this vote is the start of a discussion that should have been put in the discussion section below, where there a long discussion will not confuse easy vote counting. I would like to question your assumption that you can find a lot of stubs for immediate upgrade in a randomly selected set of 50 Stubs or a set of 50 Stubs from a category. My opinion is that only 1 or 2 Stubs (almost certainly less than 5) for immediate upgrade can be found in about 100 randomly selected stubs. At the present time I have only explored this on ornithology pages. Please show me a set of stubs where you can find 10 to 20 for immediate upgrade. Snowman (talk) 11:54, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

As a comparison, I've just looked at Category:Australian_plant_stubs and I agree with Snowman - maybe a more common category? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:09, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I was looking through the list of articles rated as "stub" by the equine project, and out of probably 75-100 articles that I looked at over an ~1 hr period, 14 of those could easily be re-rated as above stub class. I think it really depends on the category of articles you're looking at, and how well maintained that category has been. Dana boomer (talk) 13:52, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

I am not sure if you are only referring to the article page. Of course, one point is given only when both the WP banner on the article talk page and the template on the article would need to be updated from stub class. Snowman (talk) 20:32, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Really? I was under the impression that one would get a point for any action that resulted in the article no longer being a stub in any way. So, if there was no stub tag on the article, but it was rated stub-class by one or more projects and one re-rated it to start class, that was worth a point. There are quite a few articles out there with no stub tag that are incorrectly rated as stub class by various projects; my understanding was that these were included in the list of articles that could be fixed for the one point. Dana boomer (talk) 21:44, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

That was my impression as well; there are a LOT of articles mistagged as stubs by wikiprojects, much more so that tagged as stubs on the main article pages. Wizardman 22:41, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

On the project page in the section "Scoring and prizes" is says "Note that one needs to both rerate the talk-page and remove the stub tag!" Snowman (talk) 23:09, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Exactly see below ...Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:15, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

So, to clarify, the point is only achieved when an article requires re-rating on the talk page AND having its stub tag removed? Samwalton9 (talk) 11:38, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, only if there is a stub tag on the article page. If there is none, and the article is rated a stub on the talk page template, and that is changed, then that qualifies. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:34, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

I think this makes sense, if the goal of the contest is to reduce stubs - it shouldn't matter whether they were improperly formatted (no article tag or talk page) to begin with (arguably, those need more attention). My simplified understanding of the contest was "Legitimately getting rid of Stubs by any means necessary". Canada Hky (talk) 18:49, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

This details may need to be documented more fully on the main project page. Snowman (talk) 19:40, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

• Am I correct in thinking that there are no points for removing a stub template from the article page when the WP banner has already been appropriately upgraded to a Start class? Snowman (talk) 19:40, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

• I will leave this up for a week or so and get a sense of how folks feel. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:42, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
• If I say "Yes", am I saying I think it is too high, or am I saying I think it is OK? The question asks one thing, but the answers don't line up. Canada Hky (talk) 00:50, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

'Yes' means 1 point is ok (no way it should be more than 1) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:05, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Then shouldn't the question be "Is 1 point for reassessing an article appropriate?" As it is, the answers say "Yes, it is too high" and "No, reduce it to 0.5". Canada Hky (talk) 01:21, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

facepalm - you're right - changed now. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:27, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• It might be possible to manually review 50 randomly selected articles in about two hours, but there will not be many that will be suitable for immediate upgrading from stub to start (by both upgrading the WP banner and removing the stub template on the article). There might be one or two only (1 or 2 points), but with some good books in hand an editor could expand two Stubs to Start level in this time (20 points). Snowman (talk) 10:12, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• I just looked at the 19 Category:Cheese stubs starting with 'A' - two of those could be rerated. I rerated the obvious one. Some classes of articles have auto stub tags and they are often wrong. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:17, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• I think that means one uncontroversial upgrade out of 19 Stubs in the cheese Stubs category, or about 6% (needs a bigger sample to be accurate). How long did it take you to find that one? Presumably, this was repetitive work or you would have done a batch of 50. Snowman (talk) 13:34, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• Good point - it is one of those things I was thinking would be straightforward but it is a bit more time consuming than first thought. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:55, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• FWIW, I worked the past couple weeks months on the baseball assessments, knocking them from about 21,200 to 20,400, and I could easily knock it under 20k just by fixing the obvious ones. In short, a lot of it depends on the type of article (active athletes in particular labelled as stubs are going to have a VERY high rate of being not-stubs). Wizardman 02:47, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

That is interesting. I have also been thinking on ways of sampling articles to increase the chance of finding non-stubs still labelled as stubs. Snowman (talk) 14:45, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

This means that in about two weeks you reviewed 800 articles or about 50 per day. I presume this included a lot of articles already above Stub level and many that were appropriately tagged as Stubs. Relevant to this competition, how many stubs did you expand to get them above Stub level? Also, how many Stubs did you upgrade on both the article and its talk page without amending article content? Snowman (talk) 14:45, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Actually it was over the course of a couple months, not sure why I said weeks. Most of them were ones that were clearly past stub status already, I just changed them. Only about 20 or so I did any form of article expansion on (~40 if you count fixing articles to say they are retired when they had not played for 5 years). I have a grouping of about 2,500 that are tagged as stubs I have yet to go through, and since I removed the one-two sentence ones already, there could be a lot left to modify. For the purposes of this drive I will be trying to add a few sentences to borderline ones to make them clearly not stubs, since that's some of the point. Wizardman 17:01, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

• I definitely think this is one of the most subtly valuable parts of the contest (we simply have no idea how many stubs really exist right now) and is worth supporting, but not sure what exact points ratio is best. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:01, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Bonus points for expanding articles that have been stubs for over five years?

Any point in this? These might be broader topics. Hmmm.

Yes, 2 points

1. Excellent idea, a good incentive to improve articles which otherwise will probably not be improved for aeons - if, after five years no-one has brought them above stub class, then offering a small incentive to edit the article could only be a good thing. Acather96 (click here to contact me) 22:00, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

No

1. Not worth the candle. Snowman (talk) 10:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
2. I don't see the point. Sven Manguard Wha? 03:53, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

• I will leave this up for a week or so and get a sense of how folks feel. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:42, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
• No vote. Most of my work is likely to fall within the scope of hockey players, and there isn't any functional difference between a player article that has been a stub for six months, two years or five. There are areas of the 'pedia that are neglected, however, and have been for years. Resolute 00:56, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

20 point bonus for each set of ten different categories of stub have expanded?

Any point in this? Encourages a diversity of topics, although many stubs sorted differently. Just say whichever category the stub is in on December 1?

Yes

No

1. To me, this sounds rather complex. Snowman (talk) 14:10, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
2. Keep it simple and let editors decide what interests them. Mass-participation will achieve the overall diversity of this initiative. Schwede66 17:45, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

• I will leave this up for a week or so and get a sense of how folks feel. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:42, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
• Just to clarify - "set" is just any group of ten articles from different categories? Or do they have to relate to each other somehow? I think it is a great idea to get people to expand the scope a little bit. It isn't mandatory, but it rewards people who step out of their comfort zone (maybe). Canada Hky (talk) 00:49, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I'd just meant any batch of ten categories, thus if someone had done 20, that'd be two batches and double points. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• Define "category" in this context? Some of our stub sorting in hockey is as granular as "Canadian ice hockey players, 1930s births", "American ice hockey defensement, 1980s births", etc. so if that is how categories are determined, I don't know. OTOH, consider the major categories that WP:GAN is broken into. Excluding miscelaneous, there are 15 major categories. Could apply a bonus for expanding at least one article in 10 of those, and a larger for hitting one in all 15? Resolute 00:56, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Aaah, good point. This is why this might be untenable :P Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:04, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Resolute's point was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this proposal. I could do one stub each from Cat:Horse breeds from Norway, Cat:Horse breeds from Denmark, Cat:Horse breeds from Japan, etc. and get to 10 cats without even leaving horse breeds, much less the horse project in general. While I like the idea behind it (to broaden what individuals are working on), I don't think this is the best way to go about it. WRT the GAN idea proposed by Resolute, it would make it slightly harder to work only in a certain area, but with some creative stub selection I could hit 10 sections in GAN without leaving the horse project. I think that there are already plenty of bonus points, plus some extra goodies for people who work on old/important stubs. Dana boomer (talk) 14:06, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• I do not understand the proposal. Snowman (talk) 10:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

The idea is that it would be nice to get a diverse set of material improved - so would it be better if someone (say) expanded a whole diverse range of stubs rather than (say) 30 hockey players or Rihanna songs or whatever (bird articles would of course be more valuable :)) - I don't know. It was just an idea I had and I opened it up for discussion to see if other people thought it had merit. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:58, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• The work done in the competition will probably be diverse anyway, because one competitor might concentrate on Stubs on weather, and another on Stubs on trees, an another on cars. I think that it would be better to let each competitor focus on whatever they are interested in, and not try to force him or her to jump through too many hoops by including a range high-scoring pages, some of which the competitor might not be interested in. Snowman (talk) 13:16, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

• Resolute's post on Hockey players about three posts above this one is also a good reason. So I think this idea probably not a worthwhile one. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:56, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Low-hanging fruit

I doubt anyone will have trouble finding stubs to work on, but here are some really easy ones. Feel free to add more.

• Category:Psalms. Most of these are stubs, and sources are ridiculously plentiful. See these GScholar results for a randomly selected psalm.
• High-importance ethnic group stubs. A little harder to find sources, but you can usually scrape something up on Google Books.

--Cerebellum (talk) 20:35, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

I think that there are a lot of easy points. I anticipate that competitors would be able to average at least 50 points per day over the 31 days of the competition, by concentrating on their favourite topics and using a stock of books (or other reliable sources) and still have time to contribute to articles not part of the completion. It seems that some competitors are already focusing on the task and thinking about optimising their strategies. I would not be surprised if the winning score is well over 1500 points. Is anyone else going to guess what the winning score might be? Actually, I am not a fan of competitions on the Wiki, because I fear that an element of haste might jeopardise the quality of the work. If the judges are going to check every submission, then there will be a lot of checking to do. Snowman (talk) 13:07, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

*judge, right now. Casliber needs to find a few more judges, or this will be a very taxing competition. Seattle (talk) 23:25, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Yes, anyone interested in being a judge? I can ask at the stubs wikiproject too. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:51, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

If nobody objects to my also participating, I can help out a little with the judging. Obviously not for any entries I should submit, of course. Resolute 03:16, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Will keep this in mind as a last resort - thanks for offering but I think it'd be better having a judge that wasn't a participant. Let's see.......Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:54, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Next time

I think it is too late to change the rules for this contest, but next time around, perhaps some consideration should be given to current stubs which should actually either be deleted or redirected. Canada Hky (talk) 23:26, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Interesting idea - hadn't thought of that....agree it is too close to the wire this time Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 01:37, 28 November 2013 (UTC)

Scoring - last-minute note

I've just noticed:

+10 points for a stub on Wikipedia Release Version Tool

This should probably say "with a score over 1200" (which is what the link goes to), as theoretically most articles are listed on the tool. AIUI the score might fluctuate based on traffic, etc, so there may be some fuzziness around what actually qualifies. Andrew Gray (talk) 12:59, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Phew! thanks for catching that one. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:01, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

It seemed too good to be true :-). Is this only expanding, or rerating as well? (The first would seem more appropriate)

Yep, clarified. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:09, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

One other possible clarification, to the last section: "Note that one needs to both rerate the talk-page and remove the stub tag, if both are present!"? Andrew Gray (talk) 19:39, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Clarified. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:09, 29 November 2013 (UTC)

Last minute questions on assessments and scoring

So I came across the article Radiometric dating, and it had assessments from several WikiProjects (two stub, three start, two C). Does unifying the assessments (in this case, determining that the article is C quality and setting them all to C) count as "Rerating incorrectly-labelled stubs", or do all of the assessments from projects have to be stub for a reassessment to count?

A related clarification: If I expand a stub to start or C class, and claim points for that, I assume that I do not also get points for changing that article's assessment. Correct?

Thanks, Sven Manguard Wha? 20:17, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

(a) yes you get points if any one template is labelled stub (b) correct, you don't get points for changing if you've expanded it instead. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:31, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

On scoring

Is there going to be a running scoreboard, which will also note things like the oldest stub? Chris857 (talk) 22:10, 30 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm about to post something about this! Newyorkadam (talk) 02:50, 1 December 2013 (UTC)Newyorkadam

Scoreboard

Hey, I really love the stub contest! I have an idea: You make a chart/table that has all of the participants in the contest, and users can manually add on their points (like a scoreboard). You can choose to view the table either by most points, alphabetical order of name, or order of who joined. I'd be willing to do the layout and chart. Thanks for the contest! Newyorkadam (talk) 02:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)Newyorkadam

(I also posted this on Casliber's talk page)

I remember having something like that in an old competition to move files to Commons. No one ever updated their own points. Sven Manguard Wha? 04:29, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

You wouldn't be required to update your score. It would just be a basic way to see who's winning. And the people who are winning are likely the most active, so they will probably update their score. Newyorkadam (talk) 04:34, 1 December 2013 (UTC)Newyorkadam

Permission granted by the creator of the contest (Casliber). I'm going to make the chart tomorrow! (If someone wants to make it now feel free, just please tell me :) Newyorkadam (talk) 06:12, 1 December 2013 (UTC)Newyorkadam

It should be noted that the scoreboard is unofficial and all submissions should be checked by the judges at the end of the competition. Seattle (talk) 00:31, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Seattle: I'm going to put a note at the top regarding that. And, it's live! Newyorkadam (talk) 13:19, 2 December 2013 (UTC)Newyorkadam

Dang there are alot of stub regradings....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:24, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Problems with the reassessments done thus far

I'm seeing a disturbingly low level of attention put into the reassessments thus far, and wanted to bring it to Casliber's and the competitor's attention.

Simply put, I'm seeing a lot of people upgrading a lot of articles based purely on being 1501 readable prose characters or higher, with no consideration to the quality of the prose or even the suitability of the article. To quote from WP:Assessment, stubs are "usually very short; but, if the material is irrelevant or incomprehensible, an article of any length falls into this category." while Start class articles "should satisfy fundamental content policies, such as notability and BLP, and provide enough sources to establish verifiability.

There are plenty of articles that have been claimed for points that are long enough to make the jump, but are in such terrible shape that they should not. I'm not going to name names, but several people are guilty of the problem. If all that's being done for the assessments is counting words, it might as well be handled by automated programs. I know that's been done before. The results are, unsurprisingly, quite poor.

Additionally, it someone is going to be on a page long enough to make the assessment that something should be moved from stub to start, and they see glaring issues, they should either be noting or fixing those issues. The point of this contest is to improve the quality of Wikipedia's weakest articles, and I fear that a dash for cash has obfuscated that goal for some people. Sven Manguard Wha? 16:15, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think 1 point for a re-rating matches with 10 for a stub. It's taken me about 2 hours to do two stubs, whereas I could have re-rated 20 stubs in about half that time (or less). James^x12345 16:37, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't have any illusions that I'm going to win the competition, I'm using the contest as an excuse to get back into content creation on Wikipedia, but I personally don't think that the re-ratings should factor into the contest scoring at all. That's not something I would have said yesterday though; I view this as an issue of abuse issue rather than a structural issue. Sven Manguard Wha? 16:46, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm sure when it comes round to judging the judges will know what doesn't actually constitute a start or above class article. Some of the re-ratings have been awful (such as one which was rerated to start when it contained 0 references) and I'm sure they'll notice that. Samwalton9 (talk) 16:48, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

The one that caught my eye was an article that is unreferenced, has three issue tags, and consists almost entirely of about 9000B of plot summary. The fact that is unreferenced seems to me to fail the "...and provide enough sources to establish verifiability" clause about start-class. Chris857 (talk) 20:25, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

A stub is a short and fundamentally incomplete article; references aren't really linked to this. They're certainly important, but we should try to avoid inflating the stub definition to include all the problems... Andrew Gray (talk) 20:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I disagree, the Assessment FAQ describes Start class article as having "enough sources to establish verifiability", therefore having no references makes an article a stub. Samwalton9 (talk) 21:13, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

...which means we have a situation where an article could have enough information to give the reader some idea about it (as per start class), but is unreferenced. (sigh) I'd overlooked that tidbit. I haven't seen any submissions that fall in this category but will keep an eye out. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:40, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

@Samwallton9, the start article description is somewhat contradictory - begins by stating The article has a usable amount of good content but is weak in many areas, usually in referencing. Quality of the prose may be distinctly unencyclopedic, and MoS compliance non-existent; but the article should satisfy fundamental content policies, such as notability and BLP, and provide enough sources to establish verifiability i.e. highlights need for more references but also states there should be two already (which would allow passing of GNG). This is a headache as it then boils down to how the writer uses the word "should". i.e. doesn't say "must" have 2 refs or is a stub, says "should"...given this I'd say the information note below which I pointed out as a distinguishing feature between start and stub trumps this criterion right now. I also note that given the examples, I wonder how much this page has been updated in the past few years and that once this competition is over, we maybe open this up for discussion there. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

However, I hope that competitor who have rerated unreferenced articles consider adding some references in a show of good sportspersonship.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:53, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

I still think references are a requirement, the way I read that is that articles SHOULD "satisfy fundamental content policies, such as notability and BLP", AND (not should) "provide enough sources to establish verifiability." which to me makes it sound as though satisfying policies is not entirely necessary, but that articles should be verifiable. On a close reading I don't think it's contradictory either, it states that articles might be weak in referencing, but should have enough to be verifiable i.e. there can be unsourced material, but enough references that verifiability is passed. I agree though that clarification would be great! Samwalton9 (talk) 12:05, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

• I'm sure this is at least somewhat geared towards me, so I'd like to note that I stand behind my reassessments as ok. That being said, the point of this contest is also to re-tag articles marked in error as stubs, not just to expand them. Otherwise why even have assessment and stub tags in the first place? Wizardman 17:28, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't remember which my example was but having looked at some of yours most seem fine. However Neil Lumsden has two dead URLs as references so I'd still classify that as a stub and Jeff Johnson (Canadian football) has only one primary source, for example. I doubt that the judges would give points for those. I'd like to point out I'm trying to help here, this is me trying to earn you more points really! Samwalton9 (talk) 17:34, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Right, if one looks at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Council/Assessment_FAQ#Quality_scale, I think the definition of stub is narrower than some folks expect, however there is a fairly large subjective element. See, according to that a stub has "The article is either a very short article or a rough collection of information that will need much work to become a meaningful article. It is usually very short; but, if the material is irrelevant or incomprehensible, an article of any length falls into this category.", with the readers' experience described as "Provides very little meaningful content; may be little more than a dictionary definition" - hence one can give more info than this in 3 sentences or so fairly readily, unless the sentences are problematic by focussing on one tiny element of the subject, or just wrong or incomprehensible or whatever.

I think the best thing to do at this stage is that we'll take a look at the articles submitted so far and highlight ones that might be good markers of borderline cases or just a bit too optimistic. Let's not blame anyone for being optimistic as this is a grey area and it does require some good faith. Cheers, Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:52, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

(note to self - need another coffee before embarking on Wizardman's!) look, up till this point all I regrades have seen (going down the page) are plenty big enough with plenty enough info. Will be back later. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:14, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Size of entries page

Wikipedia:Stub Contest/Entries appears to be growing at about 80,000 bytes a day, or very close to 1 byte a second. It seems to me that it needs to be somehow split up, or the diffs omitted, or it will quickly become very slow. James^x12345 16:04, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps a subpage per user? We could leave a count of how much each person has done on the main page. Samwalton9 (talk) 16:24, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

A subpage per user is the way to go. I'm dubious about the count by person on the main page. We already have a scoreboard and that's so far been updated exactly once. As a user, I certainly have no interest in maintaining my data in more than one place. This is about doing something about stubs; it shouldn't be about administering the project itself. Schwede66 17:08, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I think single pages is the way to go. I'll set up my own that way and try and work out the best way to do it. James^x12345 18:10, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

It's now set up the same way as FAC, so by moving my entries to Wikipedia:Stub Contest/Entries/Jamesx12345, and using {{Wikipedia:Stub Contest/Entries/Jamesx12345}}, it automatically updates on the main page. Some would say it places a lot of load on the servers, but FAC has been using this for ages. James^x12345 18:20, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

I have been thinking about the scoreboard page that it might be best if it weren't updated by contestants, but that the judges would enter scores there after going through and marking off entries, which could be done from now. This allows us to flag anything questionable and the contestant to look over and fix to make entry qualify. This also saves us reviewing everything in one go at the end. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:23, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

NB: As far as proportion of expansions vs stubs, yes I've been surprised at just how many already-expanded stubs there are. However, it does help us identify by exclusion how many stubs are left, and I think serves a useful purpose in tidying up stub lists. I am wondering at what point the search for these articles will get harder. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:23, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

My guess is not until the 2nd or 3rd instance of this competition. Incorrectly rated stubs are everywhere… Sasata (talk) 19:36, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Wow, well we can discuss more accurate scoring for the next time round. Or maybe folks will get bored of it....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:45, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

FWIW, I've estimated in the past that ~1/4 of stub-tagged articles aren't (and probably similar ratios for talk-page labels). I don't have much to go on for this number, beyond occasional sampling, but it'd be interesting to see if others are seeing the same sort of numbers. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:37, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Not sure about the actual numbers, but the majority of my edits are focused on cleaning up the classification of stubs in {{WikiProject Film}}, and I probably find over a hundred articles per day where it has been expanded, but the talk page was never updated. If there is another round for this contest, there should also be some consideration for articles that are stubs, but do not have any stub tags on them. 90% of my edits are fixing one of these two problems. Fortdj33 (talk) 20:47, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

That's a tad higher than I'd have guessed (~1/5), but in the same ballpark. Now, how many stubs are there in this place? Sasata (talk) 20:49, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

According to talkpage ratings, two and a half million, ie ~62% of all rated articles. Yeah, that was my reaction too. Andrew Gray (talk) 21:10, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Ummm. Wow. Although - it will be interesting to see what percentage dent we can make in that number. But, it won't really be anywhere near where I was thinking it would be. Canada Hky (talk) 22:04, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

@Andrew - Holy Christ that's a huge number. I was also thinking of some sort of score to process unassessed articles as well. Anyway, we've made the rules for this one so the rules stand, but it'd be interesting after this has concluded what would be the best ratio of points, if/when we run it again. I figure it might be sooner rather than later as it might be less exhausting than the Core Contest. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 00:04, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Casliber: With such a high number of stubs to rerate, perhaps we should hold the next edition in June 2014, and make it a bi-annual event? June would get us through the first two rounds of the WikiCup, meaning that there wouldn't be that much overlap in competitors. Sven Manguard Wha? 01:48, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Sven Manguard: Yeah, might be a while as I want to run another round of Core Contest next and then I have another fun idea to explore :) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:54, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm not surprised by the number of mis-ranked articles. One of the stats I keep are a quality scale for NHL rosters. That only impacts about 1,000 articles a year, but I end up re-rating around 70-80 each year as they organically change. Resolute 00:22, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

So this contest started without those organising it being fully aware of the number of stubs (as witness the reaction to the 2.5 million figure above) and the degree to which articles are mis-rated? Might have been an idea to look a bit deeper into that first... :-) From my experience, people writing articles tend not to rate or re-rate articles they have just expanded or written. It is only some WikiProjects that work through assessment backlogs, and even then they tend to only assign an initial rating and not update the ratings. There are probably a similarly large proportion of start-class articles that should be bumped higher. Does anyone have a rough figure (it will fluctuate a lot) for the number of unassessed articles (those with no rating and no WikiProject talk page tag)? I periodically come across biography articles with no talk pages and am reminded that the bots that used to catch stuff like that either no longer run or run less often. It is worth looking at the history of the rating drives done within WPBiography (WP:WikiProject Biography), as those drives rated huge numbers of articles with not always the best results. I suspect it is many of those ratings that never got updated later following expansions. Carcharoth (talk) 02:11, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Biographies definitely seem to have a higher rate of several minor expansions, without rerating. An average bio scan reveals maybe 20 - 25 % of articles that are above stub status. I cruised through a section of medical articles, and most of the stubs there were very stubby. Your average editor might add a sentence or two to a bio, but without a fairly detailed Derm text, they would be unable to do the same for the medical articles. Just another random observation. Canada Hky (talk) 02:21, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

True. One other thing to watch for when re-rating is copyvio. If an editor with few contributions adds a large expansion from a single source (or without a source), they may well be copy-pasting from a website somewhere. Those re-rating should keep an eye out for that. Carcharoth (talk) 02:35, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Carcharoth: it says on my userpage that I am a slob and I stand by that disclaimer here. I think it has been an interesting exercise to date - more so I guess in getting ratios right. I am hoping some folks do some more stub expanding though. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:54, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I was about to say, I hope we don't forget that the most important thing is probably to actually expand stubs rather than only re-rate them; this is the action that improves Wikipedia for the general user, who won't generally notice the behind-the-scenes ratings. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 09:07, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

As far as I am aware, the consensus formed in the planning of this competition is that both re-rating stubs and expanding stubs have value for the Wikipedia. I think that people who edit the Wiki find it useful to have a grading system for articles. I think that a grading system also enhances the interest in building up a collection of articles within a WikiProject. Snowman (talk) 10:41, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

I think re-rating helps quantify the number of stub vs larger articles more accurately. All a part of housekeeping. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:07, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Carcharoth: There's >20,000 with no talk-page tags (mostly new articles, I suspect) and ~500,000 with no talk-page rating. So "no rating" is probably less common than "rated stub wrongly"... Andrew Gray (talk) 12:50, 4 December 2013 (UTC)

Is this a Stub or Start?

Re William Lawrence (London MP). It has 1543 B and 276 words of readable prose size and has six in-line references. I reclassified it from a Stub to a Start. One of the judges User Mitchazenia has a different opinion; see this edit with the edit summary of "discounting William Lawrence (London MP), its still really a stub". Any comments? Snowman (talk) 12:14, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I'd say that was a start, especially considering the criteria set in the rules; "to a minimum of 1500 b "readable prose size"." The only problem I see is that you didn't also remove the stub tag from the article page itself, but I don't think that's the issue being raised by Mitchazenia. Samwalton9 (talk) 12:21, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I think it is one that I used the page size function to assess its size before re-rating the WP banner on the talk page, but in doing this I presume that I forgot about the stub template on the article. I would agree that User Mitchazenia was not referring to the remaining stub templates on the talk page in his edit summary. Snowman (talk) 12:28, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I'd say it's a start. Ummm. Think we better get the official scoreboard going. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:52, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

NB: On the bright side - if there are some largish unreferenced stubs, a bit of text and a few refs is good for ten points rather than one (hint hint...) Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:52, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Discussion on the class of some articles can be informative. I have added a brief infobox to help it on its way to a Start. However, the tables at the end of the article are quite good for summarizing his carrer as an MP. Snowman (talk) 12:59, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I have removed the Stub templates from the article page. I am hoping that User Mitchazenia will reply or comment. Snowman (talk) 19:39, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

• Re Louis Winslow Austin. I have not upgraded this one, because there are few in-line references for a biography. Any comments? Snowman (talk) 13:19, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

I would say that one is C-class, regardless of the amount of references. Fortdj33 (talk) 14:04, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Agree with C-class - quite a substantial amount of information there. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:09, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

That is a good example of an article where the rating is less important than assessing the content and where the content has come from. Just looking at the article, it has clearly been worked on by someone who would benefit from some advice and guidance, and it has been left in a half-finished state. The page history shows that the last substantive edit was made by User:Samuel.dellit in January 2013, and that user made a lot of edits to the article but hasn't edited since (first edits on Wikipedia in 2006, big gap between then and December 2012 and January 2013). The lead section looks fine, the rest of the article is a cross between notes for future expansion and a start on sections for that expansion. Rather than re-rating, what is needed is for someone to help out with that article. Rating it as C-class and moving on is pointless. The empty subsections could be moved to the talk page for a start, and the publications list tidied up. But as this won't count for the contest, will anyone here actually do that... (I will at some point if no-one else does). Carcharoth (talk) 14:16, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Excuse my ignorance in not knowing much about this person. I would rather not upgrade it, because I do not know how much of the unreferenced material needs removing. I think that C is rather too high, because of the unreferenced blocks of text and difficulty with verification. If I knew more about the topic, then I might be able to gauge if the content was accurate and perhaps upgraded it to a Start. Snowman (talk) 15:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

It should be "start" at least - it is clearly too long for a stub. The referencing issue should not be brought in to that, but might well stop it being a C. Johnbod (talk) 21:33, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

• Re National Assembly for Wales election, 2011. This has some text including unreferenced text and it packed with tables. Should this be a Start? A lot of political pages have tables with only a few lines of text, so I presume these should stay at Stub even though the tables can be informative. Snowman (talk) 10:22, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

• Re Powell (surname). It is an article, list, or a dab? Snowman (talk) 11:11, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

• Re Ben Davies (footballer born 1993). 1285 B and 219 words of readable prose size. It is referenced and in sections with an infobox. It is a Stub (on size) or Start (on page organisation and verifiability)? Snowman (talk) 11:31, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

  Not sure about Powell, but Wales is a start (plenty of prose) while Davies is a stub (needs a couple more sentences yet). Wizardman 12:12, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

  My 2 cents: Wales is at least Start-class, Powell is a Dab, and Davies is right there on the arbitrary line between Stub and Start. Personally, I would re-rate it at Start-class, but it clearly needs to be expanded. Fortdj33 (talk) 13:07, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

  I think Powell should be a dab, perhaps after adaptation of the first paragraph. Davies could be a Stub or Start, but I would favour a Start. I doubt if I am going to enter a borderline one like Davies in the competition. I would rather not comment on the the National Assembly, because I do not know enough about the unreferenced text. Snowman (talk) 13:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

  Agree Powell is a dab, and I'd rate both Davies and Assembly as starts - as there is enough information to get a general idea about the subject. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:57, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

  Minor point of order, and pinging Fortdj33 who put {{hndis}} on Powell (surname), it is likely that the correct template should be {{surname}}. There are a family of name disambiguation pages, all of which should be explained in the documentation for the templates. Just click around to see which ones apply where. I'll go and fix the Powell surname article now. Carcharoth (talk) 01:12, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

  I'm a bit late, but surname list articles should be tagged as list-class for now, since set indices are a type of list. Surname articles that actually have some content would probably be better as stub or start-class, but they certainly are not disambiguation pages. The only ones that should be classed in that way are human name disambiguation pages like John Smith. —Xezbeth (talk) 19:00, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

  That seems logical to me. Snowman (talk) 20:13, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

• Re 1042 in Ireland. It is a redirect. Note that I am not referring to the target page. The redirect was tagged as a Stub in WP Ireland, see Talk:1042 in Ireland. I have re rated to Redirect, so I presume that this is worth one point in the competition. I would like this clarified prior to listing it and similar ones with my competition entries. Snowman (talk) 13:35, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I hadn't thought of that. If we think of the goal of retagging as to more finely quatify the actual numbers of stubs on wikipedia, then this qualifies I think and re-rating it would be worth a point. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:54, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

If you are 100% certain, then I will list 135 ones like this that I have just done. Is there a consensus on this? Snowman (talk) 14:36, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I would be tempted to say don't bother doing these ones and just get someone to run a bot re-rating all redirect talkpages! But I understand that's not an immensely helpful response ;-) Andrew Gray (talk) 18:59, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I came across the above mass of redirects by serendipity, and since then I have been thinking about an organised systematic process to find and re-tag redirects, which would appear to score one point for each redirect amended. My provisional impression is that it is possible to find lists of redirects tagged as Stubs, but it is not easy (I am talking about lists of hundreds). Why would the competition exclude fixing redirects labelled as Stubs? If there are easy ways of finding lists of redirects labelled as Stubs, then please let me where they are. Snowman (talk) 19:44, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

This database query (you need to click "do it" at the end, and it will take two or three minutes) currently generates a list of 116. (I feel it ought to be more, though.)

I don't think you should be denied points, it's just that if this can be done mechanically it seems to save you the effort ;-) Andrew Gray (talk) 21:05, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I have amended all the Talk page templates in the list of 116 articles to indicate that they are all redirects. I have not used the cat scan before. A lot of the WP templates were leftovers after merging, so I wonder if it is the way you set up the search. The cat scan looks useful, so I will see if I can find out more about it. Is there any reason why the competitors should use only manual methods and be banned from using semi-automated methods? Snowman (talk) 22:49, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Hah! Re-rating talk pages of redirects, what fun! :-) Some people, when merging articles that have talk pages, leave the talk page behind and re-classify it as a redirect. Others see that as too much bother and turn the talk page into a redirect as well... Redirects that are created from scratch, as well as those created from merges, don't need to have talk pages created to aid their classification and tracking by WikiProjects. It is possible to directly classify the redirects by putting them directly into categories. See Wikipedia:Categorising redirects. WikiProjects can then keep track of redirects by listing them somewhere and/or using categories. I'm not sure there is any uniform approach. Carcharoth (talk) 01:31, 7 December 2013 (UTC) PS. The number that always blows my mind is the number of redirects that exist on Wikipedia. Can someone remind me what it is again, some ridiculously large number... Carcharoth (talk) 01:38, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that those are not necessarily WP specific categories, so I think that specific WP banner classifications on redirect talk pages are useful for WP projects. As far as I am aware, depending on how the WP project is set up, the WP banner can classify the redirect as a redirect or as NA (for class is not applicable). I have also been changing the importance to NA, but that is not part of this competition. The more I think about it, the more I think that fixing WP banners on redirects is worth a point in this competition, and I am planning adding over 200 to my tally soon. Snowman (talk) 16:03, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Fair enough. But if someone else decides to turn all those talk pages of redirects into redirects instead of rating them (arguably quicker) then that would also deal with them. Either way, they do need dealing with, so thanks for that. Carcharoth (talk) 19:25, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Scoreboard now official

I've made the scoreboard official so we can check off as we go - discussion above indicates there is some grey areas WRT stub/start border. If we find some and flag them, I'd really appreciate it if folks took it to heart and then improved them so they were unequivocally start articles (for an easy nine extra points!). I've only done a few as WP is goddamn slow for me at present. Will try and do more anon. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:37, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Gosh, the judging looks like it is a huge task. Perhaps, the pages would load more quickly if a list or part of a list was transferred to a new users competition sub-page where the competitor has not already got a sub-page. Alternatively, perhaps to a sand-box to do the scoring. Snowman (talk) 20:26, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

If the judges are scoring manually, then I think that the judges need some help to reduce their workload. Some imaginative solutions may be needed. What are the judges points of view? Are the judges using any automatic tools? Have I missed something? Snowman (talk) 20:26, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I think is a waste of time for judges to check every single minor edit. Maybe check all de-stubs, and for re-ratings just take samples. If you find anyone not doing proper re-rating can look more in detail. Also in the true wiki spirit of collaborative and good faith editing, why not simply allow all participants to update their scores during the contest? At the end of the contest judges can double check the winners. --ELEKHH^T 06:35, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Length mk II

Whilst moving the individual sections onto their own pages has kept the page size below 100kb, the sheer size of the page means it now takes over 4s for the servers to generate. If you look at the source html, the third line up from the bottom is a comment saying how long it took the page to be served, which is normally between 0.1 and 0.2 seconds. I would propose that we simply change the {{ }} to [[ ]] and accept that having it all in one place is not going to work. This might fix the slowness of which Cas Liber was complaining. James^x12345 17:56, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

When I suggested subpages that's how I imagined it. Having them transcluded doesn't really solve the problem. Samwalton9 (talk) 18:29, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I suggested it at the time because the actual page size was growing so rapidly. The initial problem was addressed by the fix, but transcluding some fairly large pages seems to have caused trouble. The serve time is now about 0.35s, a tenth of what it was before, so and feels a lot faster. It might be nice to transclude the scoreboard to the top of the entries page, and have all of the entries sub-paged, if nobody objects. James^x12345 19:14, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Prizes

Out of curiosity, I wonder how the judges are going to find the oldest Stub and the Stub with the most views. I have been going through lists without looking to see how many hits each "Stub" had on 1 Dec 2013 nor the age. Are the competitors expected to enter "Stubs" amended with the hit count and the age for these prizes? Have I missed something? Snowman (talk) 20:12, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, there seem to be a lot less stubs being expanded than stubs being re-rated, so the judges so far don't have a ton to look through. However, I would think that each competitor could make it easier on the judges by tagging their oldest/most viewed stub so far expanded. Just (current oldest - Jan 1, 2005) or (current most viewed - 1000 hits) would help, I would think. Dana boomer (talk) 20:23, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, these should be on those "declared" by the competitor, and then checked by the judges. Don't ask them to do the spadework. Johnbod (talk) 20:32, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

If the judges are really going to do this manually (without an automatic tool), then I would agree that individual specially old or popular articles are tagged (or declared) by competitors for these two prizes. If the articles are not tagged with age nor hits, then the article would not be considered for these two prizes. Of course, each article entered with or without the age or hits would still score the points for the total accumulated score prize. Snowman (talk) 20:38, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't think Cas thought it that far through, really.  ;) But yes, I'm happy to watch and note these stats on my stubs as I submit them. User:Shubinator/DYKcheck tool is good for quick looks at article creation date (as well as the readable prose size). Of my few stubs expanded, the oldest, Mike Grant was created June 4, 2005. I'm not even going to pretend that any of the five so far had more than a couple dozen hits on Dec 1. Resolute 20:41, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I've been noting the oldest of mine (and none are likely to be highly viewed). Though, is anyone going to beat Sasata's 20 August 2003 spore print? Chris857 (talk) 20:52, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Enjambment, which I expanded, was created in February 2002. Now that might be difficult to beat ... MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 21:38, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

That's a strange one - until January 2013 it was longer than it is now (and I have just added a further 20% beyond your expansion, mostly quote examples) and should certainly not have been classified as a stub, though it seems it was. Then an idiot removed half of it in April 2013. It gets about 160,000 views a year too. Johnbod (talk) 12:41, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Intriguing, thanks for the details. It's an article that's been in my scope to improve for a while, along with many other poetry-related articles, but the competition gave me the impetus to do it. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 17:45, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I'm working on computer hardware, which goes back to October 2001, although it has been moved from Personal computer hardware. I don't know if they get much older than that... James^x12345 21:54, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I did not know about "User:Shubinator/DYKcheck". Perhaps, this can make it easier for the judges to find out the date of article creation. I can not think of an automated way to find the number of hits of a mass of articles, but I presume there is a way. I know that this stats tool gives page views for each one typed in, but it would be slow to do 100s. Perhaps, these competition prizes were set up with the knowledge that there are suitable automated tools available. Snowman (talk) 21:16, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

I think you assume too much there! Johnbod (talk) 12:14, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I was not aware of that tool. It would make life much easier for judging if each editor found and declared their oldest stub. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:24, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I have looked into this rather quickly and I think that I could write a script to find the oldest Stub in a list of Stubs. I would run the script on my computer. If there are not any unexpected technical snags, I think that my script would check through a list of hundreds of Stubs. I would just click it and it would run on its own and finish after about 30 mins, most of the time would be taken to automatically download the info from the Wiki one stub at a time. I am not in my "coding zone" at the moment, but I might think about it over the next few days and perhaps have something ready by the end of the competition. I am not promising anything. I have not thought about how to find the Stub with the most hits with a script. Snowman (talk) 16:19, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

That would be fantastic Snowman. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:13, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

I am getting something ready, which I am testing. My new script ran overnight scanning few thousand Stubs successfully and only logging those created prior to 2004 to limit the numbers, although I will probably put this back to 2003 in subsequent runs. I have yet to add a sort function, which will enable it give a printout of Stubs in chronological order. Actually, it will be in the order of the number of the first edit, which I presume is always the same as the date order. My script will not be able to jump focus to an earlier position of moved Stubs. May I suggest that if contestants would like my scrip to sort any expanded entries with a move in the edit history, they must give justification for the continuation for a Stub that has been moved. May I suggest that I think that any moved Stubs should be scrutinised individually by the judges. If continuation is valid, then I can add the former position of the Stub to the list for my script to scan. I expect that there will only be a few expanded entries that been moved in their history, so I hope this will not put too much work on the judges. Snowman (talk) 10:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• I think that the claim above that "Computer hardware" is a very old Stub is an accidental error. This Stub was created in 2009. It was made with the edit summary of "moved Computer hardware to Personal computer hardware: Computer hardware is a broad topic; article is specific to personal computer". This shows that the intention of creating a new Stub in 2009 was with the intention of making a new article that covers a much broader range than "Personal computer hardware". To me, it looks very much like the Stub was created in 2009, and not as claimed above in 2001. I think that it is likely to be helpful for competitors to have an early adjudication on this Stub, so that they are aware of what might be the oldest expanded Stub so far (I have not scanned the list of competition entries with my script at this juncture). Snowman (talk) 10:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
• For the oldest Stub competition, I think that competitors should declare that a Stub has been moved sometime in its history and be able to justify that it is the same topic. Another approach is to ban Stubs that have been moved in the oldest Stub competition. Another complication here is that automatic software will find it complex to move focus to any previous locations of Stubs. Snowman (talk) 10:31, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
• I have scanned one users submissions and I have found out that one Stub goes back to 18 September 2001 (stub moves not considered). I confirmed this manually and it seems to be valid, but the judges have not had a look at it yet to give an official opinion. I very much doubt if a decision on the Stub move discussed above about "computer hardware" will involve the winning or loosing of a prize, but I think it is important to know how the possible continuation of a Stub move will be dealt with. I have not scanned any other competitors submissions at this juncture. If anyone would like to dump a flat list (one Stub per line, wikilinked or not) of entries in a sub-page, then I might give a printout to include the date of Stub creation (not considering page moves) from time to time. To keep the printout short I have only been listing articles from 2003 or before (<=). I would need to copy the list to my computer. My script seems to scan about 15 to 20 Stubs in one minute. I am not promising anything. It it worth creating a special sub-page for this? Snowman (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I expanded William Alston, which was quite possibly the oldest stub on Wikipedia before now... (It was created 00:13, 17 January 2001, just over 4 hours after Wikipedia's first edit.) ~HueSatLum 02:50, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that the early edit numbers were not always in a logical chronological sequence. The first edit by clicking back on the diffs was on 25 February; see this diff made by a Conversion script (now blocked from editing), which seems to have confused the early edit history. Clicking forward shows older dates, where I would have expected newer edits. The diff sequence seems to be impossible. More edit history merging happened on 31 October 2009; see [1] and [2]. I think the judges will need to know what happened to the Wiki at that time to decide what was the oldest Stub. I find this very confusing. Snowman (talk) 10:11, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Nov 2013 hits

I thought that pages with a high number of hits get a high score, and given that pages with scores over 1,200 get 10 bonus points, it should be pretty easy to just check those pages that get those bonus points. I've expanded East, and that had 13,853 views in November 2013. The other two pages with scores above 1,200 had much lower views of just over 1,000 that month. Schwede66 23:06, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Useful gadget for article assessment

Just a quick tip for everyone reading this page (whether you are taking part in the competition or not), I just thought I'd point out that User:Pyrospirit/metadata is a really useful gadget! It lets you see each article's 'grade' (or lack of it) without having to go onto the talkpage, and considering some users here are doing hundreds of re-rates, this could save them a lot of time! I've had it on for years and always find it handy for spotting mis-graded articles; you can turn it on by clicking on 'Preferences', then 'Gadgets' and scroll down to 'Appearance'. The relevant tick-box is "Display an assessment of an article's quality as part of the page header for each article". Hope it helps! Acather96 (click here to contact me) 21:54, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

So many colours! I really like that utility. Thanks for posting it! Resolute 17:32, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Sixteen thousand or more down

From 30 November to 7 December, there's been a reduction in talk-page stub ratings from 2,424,228 to 2,408,063 - ie, a reduction of just over sixteen thousand. (The previous week was a 3,000 rise - so perhaps a real reduction of 20,000). Still a lot out there, but well done everyone for a first week's work! Andrew Gray (talk) 16:42, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

It got me curious, so I counted. All contestants have submitted 204 expanded stubs and 4,541 re-rated stubs. Schwede66 has the most expansions at 41, and Snowmanradio has the most re-rates at 1648. Resolute 17:44, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Interesting! I wonder if people are saving up listings, or if there's something else going on? Andrew Gray (talk) 18:46, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

I have listed all my re-ratings except for about 20 that I have lost. I have decided that it would be more worthwhile doing more re-ratings than looking for and listing the missing ones, which might take a long time. Surely, submitting lists soon after scoring points is good sportsmanship. Snowman (talk) 19:15, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

I think Andrew was thinking about people not re-rating articles in the past to save them up for this competition. But I doubt that either. Cas only very recently resurrected the idea, and most editors simply don't think about ratings. Half the GAN's I've passed were still marked as stub or start when I updated them. This is simply a case of incentivizing people to go out and address some of it. Resolute 19:22, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

"Saving up" is simply building up a backlog not yet recorded on the lists (I know I tend to enter a day's at once, and perhaps some people are saving them elsewhere and will drop them here later). I have no idea if they're doing it or not, but there's a surprising discrepancy between ones submitted for points and the rest of the re-rating surge! Andrew Gray (talk) 21:01, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Seeing as how adding them to a list takes nearly as long as reassessing when you're in a groove, anyone holding off on adding them would only be hurting themselves. Wizardman 21:59, 8 December 2013 (UTC)

Ahh, sorry, I did misinterpret your comment. I'm not sure where the other 12,000 stubs went, but I doubt they are unreported contributions to this contest. As it is, 4000 re-ranked articles in a week is impressive. Resolute 02:22, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

(groan) just checking the damn things....for some reason wikipedia is slow late in the evening Sydney time, but much faster around 6am, so have been trying to wake up early (and drink lotsa coffee) to wade through marking them a bit more quickly.....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 02:45, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• Sorry, but your missing 12,000? Me. I didn't really care about the differences between stub and unrated so I just did them. I don't feel much like sorting through which ones were unrated vs rated incorrectly and posting them up either. Though based on what I did do... that's a low estimate that does not account for new articles that were made to be stubs or unassessed that were rated to stubs. So... Resolute is incorrect in saying they went unreported - its more like I purposely decided not to report them and that I really don't see the need to report them. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 16:16, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

• My experience of rating/re-rating drives in the past (mainly from the Biography WikiProject) is that they can end up focusing too much on assigning a rating and too little on working with the content. The ideal drive focuses on a bit of both. So you have all participants doing a bit of rating and a bit of content editing, and learning from both. For example, by rating a wide range of articles, you learn a bit about the various states articles can be in and you pick up tips from looking at other articles that helps with editing. And by editing content and rescuing some of those articles, you learn a bit about what is needed and the work involved, which helps improve the work done in rating articles (both being more accurate and learning that at stub and start level, it is not essential to get the rating absolutely right). That balance between rating article and editing them varies, but it shouldn't go to extremes. The important thing is that someone has looked at and at least attempted to assess and article. Ideally, as well as a rating, every article would have an easily accessible note saying when it was last properly assessed. You only really get that level of detail once you get to GA and above. Carcharoth (talk) 19:23, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Aim of contest

As stated on the project page, "The aim of the contest is to encourage a short, sharp burst of activity, with each entrant selecting a bunch of interesting, wacky or highly needed stubs to expand." The burst of activity is there but because of the way the contest is scored, the objective of creating new content by expanding existing stub articles has been drowned in a sea of rerating. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 06:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

As far as I am aware, the aim of the contest to to reduce the number of Stubs. This competition was set up with recognition of the need for the housekeeping task of re-rating all sorts of pages that are wrongly tagged as Stubs. Snowman (talk) 09:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Yes, I hadn't quite realised the scoring was quite so slanted that way. We'll have a discussion after the close of this one as I'd like to run this again but somehow fix the scoring so the emphasis is on writing. Still, I think we really need to rerate a bunch and am happy we've made a dent in that. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 10:18, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

From a personal perspective, I am aiming to expand 100 stubs to at least start class during the contest. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 10:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps, separate and equal prizes for the two aspects of the competition is the way forward. Snowman (talk) 10:58, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Good idea! although the prizes have been already defined, but perhaps adding a special prize for the highest points on stub expansion alone can save this. --ELEKHH^T 11:45, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

To clarify, I was suggesting possible prize distribution for future competitions. Of course, the prizes for this competition have already been detailed and should not be changed. Snowman (talk) 11:59, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

• The project page says about re-rating Stubs: "This is a vital part of the rating of all our articles and getting a truer indication of stub numbers". Snowman (talk) 11:28, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

As a content editor, I find the assessment charts such as Wikipedia:WikiProject_Birds/Assessment#Statistics and Wikipedia:WikiProject Banksia/Article notes helpful in giving me a feel for what we've done and need to do. It was these and the frequency with which I fould expanded pages still listed as stubs that prompted me to include this in the competition. We need to really work on improving stubs and quantifying how many there are is an integral part (hmm, 11,391 bird stubs...wonder how many of those are actually bigger). Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:07, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

If future iterations of this contest want to channel efforts more proportionately and to recognise one approach above the other, the way to do it would be to require one stub expansion for every ten re-ratings. This would tally with the 1 vs 10 points ratio. People would be free to do more re-ratings than this, but the only re-ratings that would count for the contest would be a number equal to ten times the number of stubs expanded. Carcharoth (talk) 14:52, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

... and expansions over 1/10 of re-rating count also not scoring points? I think this requiring competitors to jump through hoops is likely to be counter productive. Snowman (talk) 15:56, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Hmmm, I am not a fan of that as it comes over as too prescriptive (proscriptive?). I would prefer to try and get proportion of "work" right. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

The funny thing is that I wanted to drop a re-rate to 1/2 point in the scoring survey because I thought re-rates were too easy. But in reality, the 20:1 ratio of points that would have created would have been fairly appropriate given the 20:1 ratio of re-rates to expansions. So raising stubs to 25 points in future iterations, plus the bonuses, should help in the future. That being said, the number of re-rates should not distract from the fact that over 200 stubs were expanded in the first week. That is nothing to sneeze at. I think that if we can get to 1,000 by the end of the contest, this should be considered nothing less than a wild success. Resolute 17:47, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Indeed....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:03, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Agreed. I'm hoping to get round to doing some stub expansion as part of this in the period between Christmas and New Year. Will probably only manage 20-30 (if that), but I'm hoping sign-ups stay open through the whole period to allow others to join in as and when they get time. Re-rating articles is good, but I would be unlikely to do 200-300 re-ratings to match with the expanded stubs if the 'matching ratio' requirement I suggested above were implemented, so my score would be rather low, but I'd still enjoy expanding the stubs, and enjoying the editing and helping out is the main thing. I think everyone can agree on that. Carcharoth (talk) 20:08, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Notifying the creating editor

I think that the editors who created the Stubs chosen for expansion during this completion might appreciate notification of the new work on these Stubs. It might prompt the creators to have an look and perhaps continue the editing. I think that it would be nice and help to acknowledge the role of all the editors that make this competition possible. I have not written code for this yet, but it looks like only a few extra lines to list the original creators (except where Stubs have been moved sometime in their history). Is this worthwhile or over the top? Snowman (talk) 11:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Why not - some of the topic matter is esoteric, so they may have good access to sources that other editors do not. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 11:46, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Edit conflict: Listing the creators is only a few more lines to my script. However, notifying creators is more difficult, because each creator would need an individualised message based on a carefully worded template and linking the relevant article. It can be done with a script, which could be 20 or 30 lines. I am not promising anything. Snowman (talk) 11:55, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Well, good luck if it works as I think it is a good idea. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:00, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

I think that the judges and the organisers are the best people to write the message. I would endeavour to send the message to creators' talk pages. Snowman (talk) 10:33, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Okay - let me know when you've worked it out and show me where to sign. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:11, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Can I claim for this?

Am I able to claim 10 points for expanding Luzon Hawk-Owl? It was 1349 bytes but had no stub tag. Its talk page was a redirect to "Talk:Philippine Hawk-Owl", so having expanded the Luzon Hawk-Owl page, I updated the class to Start on the Philippine Hawk-Owl talk page. Hope you understand what I mean! Snowman has since sorted out the talk page. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 18:07, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

• I would like to explain that somewhat accidentally I stumbled upon the above redirect when I was amending the IUCN status on that page after realizing that my IUCN semi-automatic script did not edit the owl article which usually indicates a mismatch of the names (common name or binomial) used on the IUCN, IOC and the Wiki. After finding that, I opted to scan User Cwmhireath's previous 1100 edits (which covers all her edits towards the competition) and found that this also applies to Mantanani Scops Owl, which has its talk page redirected to Talk:Sula Scops Owl. I have repaired these talk pages also. My scan would not have detected any similar problems that have already been repaired, but I am fairly sure than the scan would have found all currently existing redirected talk pages. Snowman (talk) 18:51, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
• My main aim was to amend wiki articles and the accidental errors to the talk pages; however, the incidental issue with scoring is that the competition page would indicate that there are no points for upgrading non-assessed articles. Snowman (talk) 18:46, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorry Cwmhiraeth, in future competitions, tagging and improving these we should somehow include, but for this comp I made no provision for them. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:00, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Re: Fore_River_Apprentice_School. I correctly updated the WP banner initially marked "Stub" to mark it with "Redirect" on the talk page here when the article page was a redirect. However, subsequently a user changed the article page from a redirect to an article and updated the Redirect to a Stub on the talk page, see this edit. I have removed it from my competition count pending official adjudication. Perhaps, my tagging helped the user to identify an article that he or she wanted to create. Snowman (talk) 15:04, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

That's an interesting one. I'd be inclined to say 'yes' as you correctly rerated it. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:58, 24 December 2013 (UTC)

Countdown

Would it be a good idea to add a countdown timer to the main page? Just so that individual editors don't have to figure out by themselves when exactly the clock ticks over in Greenwich. Schwede66 06:03, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good....Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 08:07, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Thank you!!

Thank you to the organizers and judges for this contest - it was very well run, and you guys had a lot of work to do to review everything and keep on top of all the entries. It was a bit of a different focus for the work, and I think it improved a lot of articles, and gave everyone a better idea of the state of articles. And to all the competitors as well - I enjoyed browsing the entry list to see where everyone was working. Happy New Year! Canada Hky (talk) 15:54, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Agreed :D Newyorkadam (talk) 19:33, 4 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

Thanks to all who rolled up wiki-sleeves and got stuck into it. Apologies we've not finished marking as yet. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:15, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, a thanks is an order (and a more formal one will be given) for the 40 who offered interest. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 17:48, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Oh boy, judges...

Just thought I'd let the judges (and everyone else) know that ChrisGualtieri has decided to list the stubs he's changed. He didn't do so until 12/29/13, and he's bolded on the scoreboard (meaning he's already been graded) for zero points. He expanded 9 stubs and re-rated 34,040. So... yeah. -Newyorkadam (talk) 05:09, 5 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

They know. I just need a userscript to be finished to submit the diff portion... Need to check with someone to do so. Besides, this script would be useful for other things in the future. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 05:26, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

We are aware as judges. There will be an announcement when we're done with the last two judges. I had bolded his name when he had no entries to make sure it was updated that he had 0. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 17:47, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

While I admire the amount of work that Chris has done to re-rate articles that are no longer stubs, it should be noted that articles cannot be classified as stubs by size alone. I agree with most of the changes that he made, but a few were reverted, because the article falls on that arbitrary line between Stub class and Start class. I hope that the judges will take this into consideration, so that Chris will receive the credit he deserves for the work he has done. Fortdj33 (talk) 19:11, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

As mentioned above, I thought that it would be sporting for competitors to list the articles updated within a day or two, so that all the competitors knew roughly what all the unofficial scores are, so that they could compete according to the latest estimated unofficial scores. Entering scores late would be like a cyclist in a race making him or her self invisible until a few feet before the finishing line and then uncloaking himself. I spent a few hours making my own script that could make a list of 100s of diffs automatically in about 20 seconds or less, so I think that waiting for someone else to write a script is not a good excuse for being late listing. I had my script for listing diffs ready by about the 4 December 2013 and listed diffs manually before that. Further, I did not know that collaboration with other people was permitted, and I wonder if getting another person to do work towards listing diffs would be allowed in the competition. I had the impression that all the work should be done by the competitor him or herself. I would ask the judges to consider disqualifying competitors that did not reasonably keep their list up-to-date and also to disqualify anyone who worked as a team or jointly with someone else, but using only one user name. Snowman (talk) 13:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Wow, that comment is really downright insulting. By the 10th day, I THREW OUT all my submissions and said I would not be submitting them because I had done re-rating both the unrated and the stubs to starts. I also said this on this discussion where I state I will not be submitting those 12,000+ - already more than twice what you did. I actually really really REALLY underreported here (and those I didn't report in time don't need to be counted). There was no rule stating that you HAD to have diffs and that you had to keep them updated to the exact day. Not even the WikiCup has it such a hardline. I find this to be absolutely disgusting that such a fuss would be made over a good spirited competition. I believed submitting the articles (without the diff) to be acceptable form of submission as they are in other competitions which do not explicitly state the requirement of a diff for points. Considering that the edits done to those pages were current and final ones by me... Now, if you are using Pop-ups, something I only recently learned about, yes it makes just plain diff-scanning without loading the article to be really really REALLY easy. Though this "disqualify for asking for a userscript to collect the diffs" is really insulting. The actual task of going through and manually linking each diff, one by one is a simply monumental waste of time at this point. I'll look to see if there is a way to auto-cull the last edit from the pages. But I do not understand where your attitude comes from this. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 14:22, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

For this competition the rules clearly state that diffs should be submitted. See the main page, which says "*The contest takes place over one month from December 1st to 31st, during which time an editor or editors knuckle down and improve as many articles as possible, and submit diffs of their work at Wikipedia:Stub Contest/Entries." Snowman (talk) 14:31, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Chris, it means a shitload more clicking for me and Mitchazenia if you don't provide the diffs - my connection is sometimes slow, my free time is limited, and sometimes I am stuck on slow computers. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:35, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I have queried issues with the judges and I think that there is nothing wrong with that. If I have misunderstood something please let me know. Snowman (talk) 14:42, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I have a question also - were all these stubs rerated with some sort of automated assistance? I applaud the numbers that got rerated, but I would be a bit upset if automation was allowed - seems rather against the spirit of things. My takeaway from the discussions before the contest started was that the emphasis should be on expanding content, and that rerating was seen as an aftereffect. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:47, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

I used AWB for semi-automatic editing (this is not totally automatic). This is mentioned in all of the edit summaries where I used AWB. I also used various self-made scripts for selecting articles/pages and making lists of articles/pages to input into AWB. There was not a rule for the completion that competitors had to use only slow manual edits. Snowman (talk) 14:55, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

If they are accurate I have no problem with them per se. I was definitely not contemplating the amount of rerates. Am I happy it has taken place? Yes, as a wikiproject participant and also trying to gage numbers of outstanding stubs, I think it has been very helpful, but I really want to make stub expansion the focus of future incarnations of this contest. We didn't make any comments on automoation beforehand. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:59, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Horses for courses. A purely Stub expansion competition will attract editors who can write English quickly and those with library access. Snowman (talk) 16:18, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, but the fact is that most of us writers have that kind of access. And it's not all the time you need a library for writing stubs. I will say, however, that yes, AWB was used, and we know for the future. And yes, I have as slow of a computer, and I am having serious trouble loading the pages. Snowmanradio's was divided up which helped. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 19:43, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• Snowmanradio seems to have done a check on redirects classified as stubs and corrected the assessments accordingly and AWB just makes it really rather easy to do (click click click), but its not an auto-bot. I did do a bunch of expansions, but I decided correcting the assessments would help out with the administration more. I searched for a body text of 600+ words and the stub tag present and began going through the list. Then I had to return for the correcting of the talk pages (where I hit issues with HWY). I also did something stupid and saved several times where I wanted to skip, including one on a single sentence stub. Snowmanradio played it ultra-safe because as the two-three second intervals between edits show, you really can't screw that one up.[3][4] AWB makes it seriously easy to fix literally thousands of articles with this, and I think Snowmanradio might have actually fixed the bulk of the mis-categorized ones. But for all intents and purposes, I don't think the re-ratings (AWB or not) should matter at all. I took up to 16 hour days, and typically worked every moment I was home till I went to bed fixing the backlog because I knew EXACTLY how many ones I had remaining at any one moment. I'm happy to have rectified a critical problem for 1.0 and I am working towards a higher-level WP:USA to make much of my headaches with that go away and I'm also involved in the orphan tag matter and I've got dozens of Good Article Reviews to do. I can do an extremely high amount of work, but I do so efficiently. The voucher was secondary to anything, and it would only buy books for my wife, but I don't know if I can even use Euros. I just wanted to make sure that this contest ended up having the latter part of its goal: completely and utterly accomplished beyond any "sane" description. I seem to have turned a few heads, burnt myself out from wanting to even LOAD up AWB and put myself through constant 8+ hour runs nearly EVERY day. I got it done, not for you, but for Wikipedia and no dangling of any petty cash drives me to do what I do. I don't sign up for things for such matters, I think Wikipedia is the most important project to humanity - if it takes one month of hell to fix something that matters to thousands of people, then by all means - bring it on. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 15:12, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• I think that there are plenty of redirects remaining classified as Stubs, because I only scanned about 300,000−500,000 wiki articles/pages looking for this situation. Some of this work I did in scanning and preparing lists of suitable articles/pages might not be obvious. You are right in that this is a safe option to reclassify redirects; however, it does take a lot of concentration to look at every talk page and see that AWB changes are appropriate. I easily did 1000 reclassifications in a 24 hour period and I probably could have done 2000 redirect reclassifications per day. Snowman (talk) 15:37, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• Sometimes I did a run of over 400 edits, then I ran my script to get the list of diffs, then I added the list of diffs to my competition list within the next 30 mins. This kept my list up-to-date, so that the judges could check my score and also that my score was visible to other competitors. I did this so that competitors could see what target they had to set themselves. I also looked at the other competitors scores especially those in second and third position and their rate of editing, so that I could gauge a editing rate for myself to keep my winning position. I think that each competitor had a responsibility to keep their own score list up-to-date and added new diffs to the score list, perhaps within about two to three days. Snowman (talk) 16:22, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I just used Microsoft Word's find and replace tool to change everything from article to Talk:article, hopefully that'll help the judges a bit :) Newyorkadam (talk) 17:03, 9 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

• I hope that change is useful for the judges, but do not see any diffs. Incidentally, I will not be able to use my diff script on another user's edits, because my script is written to make a diff list by reading snippets of my own writing. Snowman (talk) 17:30, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• To me, the page is long and problematic to use. However, the page can be split up, if the judges would find it easier to work on portions of the list. Snowman (talk) 17:30, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• I assume that the judges will need to look at talk pages as well as articles to see that both the WP banner has been changed on the talk page and the Stub template has been removed from the article. To help the judges, can you list both the article and the Talk page? Snowman (talk) 17:30, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• Is the lack of diffs causing undue delay to the scoring process? Snowman (talk) 18:02, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes the delay is due to Chris's page, everyone else's final scores are up. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 19:43, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• Any changes after 31 December 2013 do not alter the lack of diffs entered during the competition period nor the apparent invisibility of the user's score prior to the submission on 29 December 2013 leading to an article list (ie an incomplete submission of re-rated articles) to increase from zero to over 30,000. Perhaps, if the user had submitted pages every few days, then the problem of a lack of diffs would have been picked up during the competition and the user would have been able to made the necessary changes. In my opinion the judges will need to adjudicate on two issues, namely the lack of diffs and the apparent invisibility of the competitor's progress to other competitors. Snowman (talk) 17:30, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I had a similar issue a couple of years ago in the WikiCup where another competitor withheld submitting results in the final round of the competition until it was too late for others to do anything about it. Unfortunately, it was not written in the rules that results had to be submitted in a timely manner, nor was it a rule for this contest. Perhaps that should be written into future competitions? Sasata (talk) 18:04, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• Does timely submission of edits need to be written into the rules? Is an apparent invisible score consistent with this competition? I do not know the answers to these questions, but I think that rules about timely submission could be the topic of discussion for future competitions on the Wiki. Nevertheless, the rules of this competition clearly state that diffs should be included in the submissions for scoring. Snowman (talk) 18:24, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• If it wasn't in the rules, how can it be enforced? There wasn't a requirement to document your scores as you go, so he didn't do it. There is a requirement to document your diffs, so that is really the only issue. There was obviously a subset of competitors that used semi-automated / automated edits - should the lower scoring cohort complain about that? It wasn't in the rules, so it is OK. If you were really concerned about other competitors, you could have pulled up their pages and scanned their contributions. This all sounds like sour grapes, honestly. If even a fraction of these are legitimate re-rates - he kicked all of our butts. End of story. I think this competition got a lot of important work done for the overall project, and I am happy about that. Canada Hky (talk) 18:47, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• Think about the extra problems the lack of diffs has caused to the judges. The rules of the competition were made for a reason. Also, I would say that you do not know how my diff script works. It would not work on other editors diffs, because it depends on snippets of text that I specially wrote for the script to read and other editors simply did not apply this discipline. It also required writing in edit numbers into the lines of the code for each run, so it would be impractical for other competitors to use, who do not know about computer code. Any editor with a few thousand edits is allowed to use AWB, so I expect using it is option open to all the competitors. Snowman (talk) 18:59, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I acknowledged the issue with the diffs. I never said anything about your script, and I don't particularly care about it. Nor do I care about automated edits. I agree that the rules were made for a reason, but I don't see why you are bringing up an issue that wasn't outlined in the rules (saving up all one's edits). This is an issue for the judges to figure out. You are going to extreme lengths to discredit someone who did more work than you for this contest. That is sour grapes. Canada Hky (talk) 19:41, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• Excuse me, I thought that this was referring to a script in your line; "If you were really concerned about other competitors, you could have pulled up their pages and scanned their contributions". My intention is to raise an issue about the time of submissions, which the judges might like to think about. Apparently, the time of submissions has also been an issue on other Wiki competitions. Of course, I will accept the judges opinion on this point. Snowman (talk) 20:08, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I have to ask, can we please cease and desist? Let us judges finish first then we can bring up what to do for it later. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 20:14, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I don't want to get into a legal-type battle over this. I honestly don't think its productive. If you got a script, I'll defer to you, pop the pages up, and call it a day. Though the other option is that I pull up batches that I did from the contribution history and submit those lists instead. I don't think it particularly useful to try and game the system and I didn't know it was a requirement and this discussion is long. "Winning" isn't everything, but if it matters such, please do write it into the rules - though without a better way to report it, I don't think I'd be able to submit the results next time. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 18:38, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• My diff script will not work on your edits for several reasons. Snowman (talk) 18:50, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

• I note that one of the judges has been strict with the rules and disallowed 10 points for the expansion of a Stub where the talk page of the Stub was a redirect; see edit on 24 Dec 2013. The competitor removed the article from her submissions; see this edit Snowman (talk) 18:50, 9 January 2014 (UTC)
• I'm out of this. Put me down as withdrawn or whatever. The second alphabetical list in my submission wasn't even the right list I wanted to submit (it was an intermittent and incomplete list not culled from the tag and talk page confirmation edits). So I screwed up the diff portion? Oh well. Snowman's antagonizing over MONEY (something I've stated several times now is irrelevant since I can't use Euros and even if I could it's not for me) I think I'm just staying out of it. I said that I don't think re-ratings should have counted and shouldn't be counted next time (AWB or otherwise). Snowmanradio's redirect "assessments" may have fixed things, but it wasn't subjective and didn't need to be checked by a human. I think the behavior and attitude of Snowman is pretty poisonous and shows that "I must win" mentality. It's sickening. If there is any prizes given out, it should be for people who actually worked on the stubs improvement. Snowmanradio didn't improve one article from Stub. No wonder the decision to clean up pages with the "redirect" tag was done; it's not subjective and its fail-proof as a result. It just shows the real nature of this. No one else is making a fuss about their contributions and I don't want to be "WINNER". I shouldn't have entered and I shouldn't have submitted. Apologies for wasting your time. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 00:26, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

• The following are a list of redirects that were re-rated from Stub to Start class by one of the competitors. Diffs show my amendment to re-rated them correctly to Redirect class. Snowman (talk) 14:59, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
• 1. Race Against The Machine 590078485
• 2. Marshal (comics) 590078427
• 3. 2011 Ohio exotic animal release 590078386
• 4. Collect on delivery 590078277

Issues

To help the judges, I have make a list of issues with one of the users page list. I have looked at about 150 pages for general issues which were the first pages I came across and I found 88 issues. I have also scanned many more specifically looking only for redirects with the regexes that I used for the competition and is seems that this picks up a few problems with redirects, which seems to be a minor problem here. I have also looked at all the pages starting "List of ..." and I found very list that I looked at had an issue. Have I missed something that might explain this list? Snowman (talk) 21:16, 9 January 2014 (UTC)

Comment I think something got crossed in here, because I think something went wrong with the second part of the list I culled. It wasn't even the right PART, it was cleaning up stray tags. The poetry ones are listed as NA by the Wikiproject and I don't think I should alter them, I got hell for that once. Not all "lists" need be "List class" and several were "uprated to start" like Talk:1. deild kvinnur because they were specifically listed as a start by two other Wikiprojects and it contains quite a bit of information in list form that I felt warranted it as such. Spare yourselves the hassle. I'm not up for some witch hunt because those ones were not the complete (or even the right ones) in this case, and some like Talk:Carbon Ring were deleted. Tell you what. I'll drop out, you can keep your grubby little 100 euros. Some of those (actually I think half that list or more) were actually stub tag removals when the talk pages were starts or higher and the word count was over 600 words. And by definition, those don't count, right? Just drop it, I messed up the diff checking portion. So what, but this "Reward" goes right against my inclinations of WP:PAY. I never wanted it, I don't care about it. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 00:12, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, actually, you're wrong about Talk:1,000 Places to See Before You Die. As seen by this edit, a user deleted the rating. I've re-added it. And, you're right, almost all of the ones you listed Chris did not in fact change the page. However, Chris clearly still beat you in the content, and you're being sour about it. Now, Chris just quit the contest, but I'm wondering whether you're doing this contest to improve Wikipedia or win. Clearly Chris doesn't care about the prize - he hasn't since the beginning. Why don't you just drop it and accept second place? You both did a great deal of work and helped Wikipedia, but it's over. -Newyorkadam (talk) 00:31, 10 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

I see. I missed that an editor deleted the WP banner on that page with this edit. I have removed that talk page from the list above. Snowman (talk) 01:31, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Edit: I just realized that actually none of those (that I checked) are incorrectly listed. Some WikiProjects, such as WikiProject Poetry, do not require a rating. However, a {{Poetry-year-stub}} was added to the actual article. In these edits (the first three in your 'not edited by the competitor' section), User:ChrisGualtieri clearly removes the stub tags 1 2 3. So, Chris did in fact remove the stub tags, thus reducing the number of articles rated as stubs on Wikipedia. -Newyorkadam (talk) 00:43, 10 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

Your diffs are to stub template removal of the article page, which does not get a point without a corresponding upgrade to the WP banner on the talk page. Please comment on more of the issues on the list above. Snowman (talk) 01:41, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Well, the talk page switch revealed the issue. When you converted the list, the ones I submitted were "stub TAG" removals but not every "stub tag removal" really needs the talk page updated. Solves that mystery for me. I used a list derived from one of those lists to actually update the talk pages and I think that list for the talk page ones is the one I should have submitted. Oh well. You live and you learn. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 00:48, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Yes, I think that updating the stub template on the article in isolation does not get a point, as far as I understand the scoring. I think that explains why your submitted list of pages (without diffs) appears to contain a lot of non-scoring pages, even if they had been submitted with a diff. Snowman (talk) 01:41, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

My assumption is that User ChrisGaltieri has withdrawn from the competition. Snowman (talk) 02:25, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

• The way I see it is that I am trying to reduce the risk of the judges getting egg on their faces. I included diffs with my submissions. I kept my submitted list up-to-date during the competition. I only had one submission rejected by a judge, but another judge thought that the article was correctly upgraded from a Stub to a Start. I made a few mistakes along the way, but I think that I have fixed them all. The judges have given me a score of over 6000 points. It is not about the prize money. Snowman (talk) 02:14, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Destubbed stub with highest pageviews december 1

Damn - I was expecting that folks would check their own and post the most promising/popular ones. I can't figure out how to do from judges' end with the tool - can folks check theirs and let us know? Even scanning the list might pick them up. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 03:39, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Won't be needed, I have them. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 04:11, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Sorry folks, was hasty in posting request. Announcement imminent.... Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 04:31, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Stub Contest winners

Well, finally time has come to announce the winners for the Stub Contest. After a month and eight days of judging, these results are final and will not be changed. Just some notes, the stub contest netted us 656 expanded stubs and 11,051 re-rated stubs. Starting off with the >1200 on the Wikipedia Release Tool, Cwmhiraeth won the €25 bonus with Mouth, which got 1,554 on the tool. Congrats to her and remember that name. Second, the oldest stub expanded was William Alston by HueSatLum, which was created on January 16, 2001 (the day after Wikipedia was founded!). The €25 prize for that will go to him for such a big find. Congrats.

Finally, the vital results people care about. Starting off with fourth place, with a grand total of 1,332 points (the nerd in me wishes you got five more points), is Schwede66, expanding 116 articles with a main focus in the New Zealand electorate. He also re-rated an almost equal 115 stubs. He will get the €25 prize for the hard work. Third place goes to WikiCup veteran Sasata, who scored 1,822 points, expanding 43 stubs and re-rated 1,602 articles that were incorrectly marked, netting him €25. The next prize up is the €50 for second place, and I will credit this editor for her hard work in this regard. She's already won the €25 for the >1200 contest, and she earned this €50. With a total of 3,055 points thanks to 300 stub expansions and 35 re-rates, Cwmhiraeth will get a total €75. Applause should be considered here.

Finally, there is one more prize to be awarded, the €100 first place prize from Amazon. This person worked with AutoWikiBrowser and a special script to post his diffs and worked to find stubs mis-marked everywhere. While he did not expand any stubs, he re-rated a grand total of 6,492 stubs, meaning he earned 6,492 points. The first place award will go to Snowmanradio and congratulations are in order to him for his hard work.

Anyway, this ends the Stub Contest for now. Casliber and myself thank the people who participated or even showed interest in joining. We really hope people will participate again the next time we run the contest. In that time, we will probably gauge consensus for new rules. We hope everyone at least enjoyed the contest. The winners should send their contact info to User:Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry from Wikimedia United Kingdom who were nice enough to grant us these vouchers and will be contacted on their talk page. Thanks to all that participated and a final congrats to the winners. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 04:55, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Just a question... I don't really understand winning a bonus prize for having the highest score on the tool. I understand that the tool ranks articles' vitality by score, but in the rules the only two bonuses are:

• €25 special prize for the editor who de-stubs the oldest stub (dated from first day of creation)
• €25 special prize for the editor who de-stubs the stub that received the highest number of page views on December 1st 2013 (i.e. the first day of the competition)

But where does it mention the user with the highest score on the Wikipedia Release Version Tool? -Newyorkadam (talk) 12:45, 10 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

I agree with Newyorkadam. The bonus prize was awarded to me for the highest score on the Wikipedia Release Version Tool but should have gone to the expanded stub with the highest page-view on Dec 1st. My best page view on that day was probably 603 hits for Mouth. Did anyone else do better than that? Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:18, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Millimetre got 1029 (+ 23 for the alternative spelling) on the 1st. Computer hardware got 1807 on that date as well, and is in the top 10,000 by views, but my expansion of that one isn't so clear-cut. James^x12345 19:55, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

I expanded East, but that didn't get views anywhere near as high (334). Schwede66 20:54, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

If other folks can double check their popular expansions that'd be great. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:12, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

The tool kept forking on me when I put Computer hardware in and would never come up with it. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 23:30, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

User:Jamesx12345, I really think you're being modest-- you expanded the article from 3,675 bytes to 14,564 bytes in just this edit alone (not even considering your other edits on the page). As for the articles I expanded, Coach (sport) and Comedian, the articles got 250 and 455 views, respectively; I guess I lost this bonus :P I'll check some other articles that were expanded that might have gotten a large amount of views.-Newyorkadam (talk) 03:57, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

If it comes down to it the €25 bonus can be moved to Jamesx12345. Cwmhiraeth is already guaranteed the €50 prize for 2nd. As I said, the tool never loaded Computer hardware, and I feel bad because I tried everything to get it up fairly. Mitch32^{(The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.)} 05:38, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

@Newyorkadam: - Computer hardware was largely the result of a merge from Personal computer hardware - which looked like this before. Most of that was pretty rubbish, to be honest, but I kept some of it. I made of point on my entries page of saying I wasn't responsible for all of it, but the judges accepted it without comment, so I assume it qualifies. That said, I'm not bothered if somebody else gets the prize. James^x12345 09:56, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

• 19195 hits for "Black bun" on 31 Dec 2013 (Miyagawa). I have not checked all the expanded stubs.Snowman (talk) 18:46, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

• This is for December 1st, not December 31. It got 40 views on December 1st. -Newyorkadam (talk) 19:35, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

• Whoops. I agree that "black bun" had 40 hits on 1 Dec 2013. Snowman (talk) 19:38, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

• 30073 hits for "Yvo de Boer" on 1 December 2013. (ChrisGualtieri). Snowman (talk) 21:12, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

When I said "de-stub" I meant "expand" article (i.e the pool for most-viewed is from expanded stubs) - no benefit for readers by removing a tag of a commonly viewed article. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 21:30, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I get that, but how is that relevant? -Newyorkadam (talk) 21:47, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

See Wikipedia:Stub Contest/Entries/ChrisGualtieri. "Yvo de Boer" has been given a green tick by a judge as having been expanded and re-rated and I assume that it has been awarded 10 points. Snowman (talk) 21:50, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

No, I was talking to Casliber about what de-stub means. I understand about Chris's expansion :) -Newyorkadam (talk) 21:52, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

The rules say that the Stub prior to expansion should look like a Stub to gain points, and I assume this is what User Casliber was referring to. "Yvo de Boer" is not one I did. It was submitted by User ChrisGualtieri, as indicated in the name in round brackets. Snowman (talk) 21:56, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Apologies/my bad. Forgot that was an expanded one. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:43, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

Out of interest, do we know how much the total of overall stubs declined by on enwp over the contest? How much of a dent did we make? Acather96 (click here to contact me) 21:06, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Bump. Acather96 (click here to contact me) 17:53, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

DRAFT

I wrote a script which came up with a list of the expanded stubs and the hit counts. Expanded stubs that had been given a green tick were processed (and perhaps a few without a green tick). I manually copied and paste all the article names to a list in my PC, which was repetitive and I hope that I did not make any mistakes. One of the competitors has had his page of submissions deleted, so obviously I could not see those. After that my script did the work of getting the hit counts and listing them. I have put a list of all the expanded Stubs with over 100 hits on 1 December 2013 below. The script is new and it may have errors, anyway the hit counts are easy to manually check with the grok tool. Page moves and merges might complicate page views and my script did not take this into consideration. My script might not work with page titles with accents or odd characters in them. I would assume that expanded Stubs with high numbers of views might receive scrutiny by the judges. The hits in the month of December 2013 are given after "Month=". This is a draft list. It is not an official list. Snowman (talk) 22:20, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

• 30073 hits for "Yvo de Boer" Month=982987 (ChrisGualtieri)
• 1807 hits for "Computer hardware" Month=79094 (Jamesx12345)
• 1029 hits for "Millimetre" Month=19679 (Jamesx12345)
• 772 hits for "Education in the United Kingdom" Month=19659 (MasterOfHisOwnDomain)
• 723 hits for "Gourd" Month=14668 (Dana boomer)
• 603 hits for "Mouth" Month=12999 (Cwmhiraeth)
• 586 hits for "Compilation album" Month=16204 (Samwalton9)
• 455 hits for "Comedian" Month=11829 (Newyorkadam)
• 410 hits for "Malcolm Subban" Month=6815 (Canada Hky)
• 409 hits for "Enjambment" Month=11742 (MasterOfHisOwnDomain)
• 343 hits for "Campus" Month=8187 (Jamesx12345)
• 334 hits for "East" Month=9533 (Schwede66)
• 321 hits for "Raven Software" Month=8615 (Samwalton9)
• 299 hits for "Shooting" Month=6386 (Jamesx12345)
• 279 hits for "Paul Ranger" Month=3552 (Canada Hky)
• 250 hits for "Coach (sport)" Month=7024 (Newyorkadam)
• 224 hits for "Kia ora" Month=5597 (Schwede66)
• 184 hits for "Eight Elvises" Month=11934 (Sven Manguard)
• 160 hits for "Chum salmon" Month=5482 (Cwmhiraeth)
• 151 hits for "David Jones (video game developer)" Month=2284 (Samwalton9)
• 150 hits for "Dysmorphic feature" Month=11085 (Canada Hky)
• 145 hits for "Chris Gragg Month=2028 (Seattle)
• 139 hits for "Emilia Jones" Month=4143 (Ruby2010)
• 134 hits for "Bar-backed Partridge" Month=4161 (HueSatLum)
• 132 hits for "South" Month=4566 (Jamesx12345)
• 129 hits for "Peter Holland (ice hockey)" Month=6301 (Canada Hky)
• 129 hits for "Ghost Note" Month=3702 (ChrisGualtieri)
• 127 hits for "Carl Gunnarsson" Month=1712 (Canada Hky)
• 125 hits for "Saanen goat" Month=2557 (Dana boomer)
• 110 hits for "Morgan Rielly" Month=4253 (Canada Hky)
• 103 hits for "Old Man of Stoer" Month=590 (Jamesx12345)

Thanks for doing this Snowman :) I'm sure it'll help out the judges. I would advise keeping this tool handy in case it's needed in a future contest. -Newyorkadam (talk) 22:32, 11 January 2014 (UTC)Newyorkadam

• It is only a list made by a fully automatic script written today. Actually, I am can not get into a coding zone today, so I might have a look at the code another day. The list has a lot of limitations, and the judges will need to add a human element. If it helps, I could list all 620 expanded Stubs with page counts on my list (one competitor had is submission page deleted), but I do not want to bulk out the Wiki unnecessarily. I could list the 50 expanded Stubs with the lowest counts, but I would like a consensus before I did this. Snowman (talk) 22:50, 11 January 2014 (UTC)

• Provisionally, I found five expanded Stubs with unusual characters that my script did not handle. With manual checks I have found that these articles all had less than 100 hits, so the above provisional list of popular Stubs is not affected by this limitation. Snowman (talk) 12:20, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

• I found 40 expanded Stubs that had no hits and 60 that had one hit on 1 Dec 2013. I found 330 expanded stubs with 6 or less hits on 1 Dec 2013, which is about half of all of Stubs expanded in the competition. Perhaps, scoring in future competitions could inspire greater motivation for expanding higher numbers of popular Stubs. Snowman (talk) 12:20, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

Results?

Please could the judges formally re-announce the winners of the contest (or are they still deliberating?) as there seems to have been some changes since the winners were originally announced a week ago. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 13:27, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

The one change is the expanded stub with the most views on December 1st - the article Yvo de Boer had a whopping 30073 pageviews - so the winner of the €25 prize is ChrisGualtieri (talk · contribs) - other winners as stated above. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 12:30, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

Cool, thanks. ChrisGualtieri (talk) 13:49, 19 January 2014 (UTC)

• The list above of popular Stubs was created by a fully automatic script, which I explained above. I ran the script and it produced the list with no further input or monitoring by me, and it was a complete surprise to me to see "Yvo de Boer" at the top of the list. I cut and paste the top portion of the list to this page above. The script lacked a human element which is essential for final scrutiny of the winning expanded article. I would have called the article "Yvo de Boer" (see this article prior to expansion) an obvious Start class article (albeit labelled as a Stub) prior to its expansion in the competition, but the judges (or one judge) approved its expansion from this state to an expanded state and awarded 10 points and hence my script included it in the list. Personally speaking, I think that it should only have been awarded one point for re-rating, and so it should not have been eligible for the prize of the most popular expanded Stub. I would think that the judges should look at this again. Perhaps, a consensus can be formed on this with competitors and other editors contributing to the discussion. Snowman (talk) 15:24, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

That was one thing I intended discussing. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 13:00, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Do you still want to discuss it? Snowman (talk) 14:19, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

• The score table does not balance - ie there are some mistakes. In order to balance the score table, I think the following need correcting: Snowman (talk) 15:16, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

• Sasata ––––––– should have scored 2057, but given 1822
• Miyagawa ––––– should have scored 75, but given 80
• Jamesx12345 –– should have scored 374, but given 324
• Tom Morris ––– should have scored 13, but given 12

If you're absolutely sure about the calculations I am happy for you to edit the scoreboard. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:23, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I used some semi-automatic methods to transfer the scoreboard to a spreadsheet on my computer. The spreadsheet will balance with the above amendments. Transferring competitors submissions to the scoreboard needs double checking. Of course, multiplication and addition are used to calculate each competitor's total scores. Snowman (talk) 12:03, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

Prizes

I left a message about the Stub Contest on User:Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry's talk page, but I have not had a reply. Can the judges provide a telephone number to WikiMedia, so that I can arrange to receive my prize? Have the other prize winners been able to contact WikiMedia for their prizes?Snowman (talk) 18:28, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

If the time it took for a reply/prizes in the Core Contest is anything to go by, you're being optimistic to think Richard will reply in a day; the whole process took several weeks. MasterOfHisOwnDomain (talk) 19:12, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

I have sent him an email earlier today. He needs your email address as the voucher comes in the form of a code to apply to an Amazon order. Cwmhiraeth (talk) 19:16, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

I had a reply within a few days of contacting sending him wiki e-mail. No voucher yet, but there's no hurry either. Schwede66 19:29, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

The judges announced that the winners should contact "User:Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry" and that it what I did on his talk page on 15 Jan 2014. I may be out-of-the loop, because I do not see any email addresses for him anywhere. Snowman (talk) 20:20, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

There is an 'email user' in the left hand column of his userpage. Can folks keep me posted about correspondence? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:32, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Five out of the six prize have been distributed. Regards -- Katie Chan (WMUK) (talk) 01:19, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Please send an email to me via the "Email this user" feature from your account (so that I know it is the right person claiming). Thanks -- Katie Chan (WMUK) (talk) 14:46, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Thank you, I received the token. I have not spent it yet. I will probably get a pair of good quality cycling gloves. I have informed Richard to avoid unnecessary duplication. Snowman (talk) 12:46, 24 January 2014 (UTC)