Education/News/January 2022/30-h Wikipedia Article Writing Challenge
30-h Wikipedia Article Writing Challenge
In December the 30-hour "hackathon-style" Wikipedia article competition took place in Estonia. This was the second time such a competition was organized in Estonia. This year 10 teams from different parts of Estonia took part in the competition. Each max 4-member team had to consist of at least two students or pupils.
In the first competition in 2019, the participants wrote articles about the Estonian towns, this time the topic was about the Estonian municipalities. The single topics were drawn randomly between the teams at the beginning of the competition. After that participants had 30 hours to collect material, structure the article, write the text and format it properly as a Wikipedia article. The winning team wrote about Mustvee municipality.
Due to the pandemic circumstances, the project was fully transferred to the Zoom environment, however, this favored bigger participation from different parts of Estonia.
The grand prize of the competition was 1000 euros, but the prizes were given also in some other categories such as „the best school team“. One of the participants, Marja Liina Soasep, pointed out that the process provided a good experience in time planning and taught them that curiosity is one of the strongest things to have. The intense competition offered a good dose of adrenaline and the team definitely plans to participate next year as well.
According to Ivo Kruusamägi, a member of the jury and a representative of Wikimedia Estonia, Wikipedia is by far the most visible source for introducing the history, geography, and culture of different regions of Estonia. He also draws attention to the fact that Estonians themselves have to write thorough articles on topics related to Estonia because no one else does this work for us.
The article competition supports the teaching of media literacy and is related to the educational activities of Wikipedia for Estonian schools and universities. It was organized by Wikimedia Estonia in collaboration with the University of Tartu Youth Academy.