User talk:PatrickFlaherty/Archives/2010/February - Wikinews, the free news source

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Wikinews writing contest reminder

Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

To keyboards!!

Points to remember

The competition page is here. Remember, you'll need to move from the newcomers to experienced section as the competition progresses.

Everyone who's new to Wikinews remind yourselves of the article guide and style guide. And, use the Enter an article tab in this template to correctly start your competition articles.

Wikipedians! See here.

Published entries

• More...

All other entries

Getting Help

Possibly the fastest way to get help is to look for the regulars in the #wikinews IRC channel on Freenode. See this page for more details. Remember, many people will lurk, connected long-term, but not regularly checking for messages. Please be patient when looking for answers to queries, it can be annoying to see someone ask a question but leave before you notice it.

The usual places to look

Start here for competition-ready templates

Use this form to create a competition-ready article. Be sure to check the Main page and Newsroom to see you're not creating a duplicate. Please also add your article and point score to the log so that your score can be counted.

Good luck!

—Message delivered by MikemoralBot on 23:14, 24 January 2010 (UTC)Reply

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter

Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter
Week 1 - January 31, 2010

Current leaders

The current leadership table looks like this:

Rank	User	Points	Articles
1	Tempodivalse	165	36
2	Dendodge	126	12
3	Bencherlite	65	11
4	Pmlineditor	65	10
5	Microchip08	55	13
6	Blood Red Sandman	46	8
7	Rayboy8	36	9
8	Tristan Thomas	26	1
9	TUFKAAP	25	1
10	The wub	20	4
11	RockerballAustralia	19	5
12	Wizardman	13	3
13	Juliancolton	4	2
Total		557	111

A full list of users' articles is located at Wikinews:Writing contest 2010/Standings/log
All scores correct at time of newsletter.
Many thanks to The New Mikemoral whose bot delivered this to you.
Newsletter compiled and written by Tristan Thomas. Any suggestions welcomed.

The contest so far

As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 111 articles.

This Week

Brian McNeil reports on the first week; as the instigator and main organiser of the competition, he has a large interest in its continuing success.

Wikinews' 2010 writing contest got off to a brisk start this week with entrants scheming to have the first post-midnight submission.

A particularly high number of barely-qualifying articles on the first day saw a notable record sent for the most articles published in one day since the introduction of Flagged Revisions.

Tristan Thomas upped the stakes on the second day of competition with an original reporting interview scoring 26 points and moving him near the top of the leaderboard with only one article, as-compared to others prolifically contributing short 3-point articles.

Reviewing is, at the moment, the most problematic issue with the competition. This can be as time-consuming as the actual creation of an article when copyediting for active voice, formatting per the style guide, and reading all cited sources. Competition entrants are strongly advised to ensure their browser supports a spell-checker; beware developing offline with a word processor that uses 'smart quotes' and other nonstandard characters; only cite the sources needed; review all copyedit changes to their articles done during, and after, the review process; and, to ensure they are very familiar with the style guide.

With only thirteen competitors on the scoreboard at the end of the first week, where are all the entrants? Comprehensive and in-depth submissions could easily change the leader positions. The current top five are Tempodivalse, Dendodge, Bencherlite, Pmlineditor and Microchip08.

—Message delivered by MikemoralBot on 04:48, 1 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Writing contest newsletter: week 2

Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter
Week 2 - February 8, 2010

Current leaders

The current leadership table looks like this:

Rank	User	Points	Articles
1	Tempodivalse	206	44
2	Dendodge	159	13
3	Microchip08	96	24
4	Bencherlite	65	11
5	Pmlineditor	65	10
6	Blood Red Sandman	65	9
7	Rayboy8	59	14
8	RockerballAustralia	48	8
9	Tristan Thomas	26	1
10	TUFKAAP	25	1
11	The wub	20	4
12	Wizardman	13	3
13	MisterWiki	6	1
14	Juliancolton	4	2
Total		557	145

A full list of users' articles is located at Wikinews:Writing contest 2010/Standings/log
All scores correct at time of newsletter.
Many thanks to The New Mikemoral whose bot delivered this to you.
Newsletter compiled and written by Tristan Thomas. Any suggestions welcomed.

The contest so far

As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 145 articles.

This Week

Tempodivalse reports on the second week of the competition. He is the current leader on both points and articles.

Well, we're now about two weeks into the contest. The initial "flurry" of activity has now subsided significantly, and we've settled down to an output of about ten articles per day, down from 25-30 articles in the first few days of the competition. That's less than I had hoped, and a lot of the 31 original sign-ups have yet to write anything, but I can't complain; we've attracted at least half a dozen new contributors to the project, such as Microchip08 and Wizardman, who are doing a great job expanding our coverage.

The point scoring system was designed to encourage in-depth articles, rather than a mass of stubs, and it shows: I estimate our average article size to have increased by several paragraphs, which I believe is good, as it helps encourage casual readers to stay on the site and read more.

I'm in the lead at the moment, and I admit that the gap from first to second place - and especially second to third - is fairly large, but I don't want that to discourage participants (as it appears several people have been). It's not as big a gap as it seems, and two or so in-depth articles would easily bring 50-60 points, placing one well within striking distance. Plus, there are still another ten weeks left, ample time to catch up.

Anyways, happy editing to all and good luck.

—Message delivered by MikemoralBot on 03:31, 8 February 2010 (UTC)Reply

Contest newsletter: weeks 3-4

Latest comment: 14 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter

The Wikinews Writing Contest 2010 Newsletter
Weeks 3-4 - February 21, 2010

Current leaders

The current leadership table looks like this:

Rank	User	Points	Articles
1	Tempodivalse	225	49
2	Dendodge	159	13
3	Rayboy8	132	27
4	Blood Red Sandman	103	13
5	Microchip08	96	24
6	Bencherlite	65	11
7	Pmlineditor	65	10
8	RockerballAustralia	48	8
9	Tristan Thomas	46	2
10	The wub	42	6
11	Wizardman	28	4
12	MisterWiki	26	3
13	TUFKAAP	25	1
14	Benny the mascot	5	1
15	Juliancolton	4	2
Total		1066	173

A full list of users' articles is located at Wikinews:Writing contest 2010/Standings/log
All scores correct at time of newsletter.
Many thanks to The New Mikemoral whose bot delivered this to you.
Newsletter compiled and written by Mikemoral. Any suggestions welcomed.

The contest so far

As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 173 articles.

This Week

Dendodge comments for this newsletter. He is currently ranked 2nd in the competition.

As we approach the fourth week of the contest, the activity levels have decreased greatly compared to the first few days, and we are now down to between five and ten articles per day. I can't claim to have helped the situation—I haven't written anything for about a week. I'm not complaining, however, as I have somehow managed to stay in second place. While this may make the gaps between competitors seem too large to overcome, it should take only a couple of in-depth articles to overtake me. In fact, with so much time left, I wouldn't even rule out somebody knocking Tempodivalse down into second place!

The articles we are getting are still relatively in-depth, though much shorter than at the beginning of the contest. Remember, in-depth articles mean we can better compete with the mainstream media (and they're worth more points!).

I have also noticed a widening of our geographical and categorical coverage. While we used to cover mainly US and Western Europe, with particular focus on "important" issues such as politics, we have now branched out (probably out of desperation to find more points!)

Finally, I would like to thank everybody for their participation, and wish you all the best of luck.

—Message delivered by MikemoralBot on 22:35, 21 February 2010 (UTC)Reply