Talk:Wikipedia Language Challenge

I came up with two new ideas, one to make the challenge more interesting during the entire competition time (with the advantage of simplifying point counting) and one to make it more interesting in improving small wikis (but has the drawback of complicating point counting somewhat).

For the first one i suggest to make everybody in the chain get the same number of points, and that is equal to how many new language versions the article ends up with. That makes it interesting to jump in somewhere in the middle, instead of having an advantage of getting in early or last. It is still good to get in early, because people will probably be more likely to translate an article already in the list and thus get a few extra points comparing to starting a new lane.
The other suggestion is to introduce a weighting system. My idea is that if an article already exists in 50 languages it is probably very important and should be in even more. If it is only in one language version it might be something really obscure that we do not need in all languages. So the weighting system could perhaps work like the following. A = number of languages the article was in before the competition started, B = number of language versions the article is in when the competition ends; Points given = $A*(B-A)$ Example: An article is in 20 languages when the competition starts and in the end it is in 35 language versions. This renders 20*(35-20)=300 points, given to all that contributed with a translation, and if an user writes several language versions points are given for each (so if the same user made all language versions in the example above 300*15 points are given to the user).

--Ainali 06:22, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Jan, Thanks a lot for these ideas. As for the first one I've changed the rules according to your proposal and I think, it's much more motivating and much more easy to understand. Concerning the second idea, I suggest not to implement a weighting system, as it seems too difficult to understand. Thanks again --Frank Schulenburg 16:01, 28 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I agree with you that the second proposal is a bit too complicated. The state the competition is in now I think will be easy enough to comprehend so let's go with that one. --Ainali 19:01, 29 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]