Wikipedia Language Challenge

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Introduction

This is a game to make Wikipedia more international and to increase the level of cooperation between different language versions. By nominating articles, you can make other language versions create articles about topics that you find interesting. Imagine getting an article about the national food dish of your country or a dance style of your culture in a Wikipedia that is read by people from another continent. The goal of the game is to start as many and create as long article chains as possible, i.e. a series of as much language versions for the nominated articles as possible.

This competition will run for four weeks and all winners will get to choose from a variety of prizes, all donated by Wikipedians around the globe.

Rules

  1. Every Wikipedian is allowed to start a new chain (or more). All themes are allowed and there are no restrictions about the topic of the article as long as the topic fits in Wikipedia.
  2. Wikipedians who join a chain will do this by translating or creating a new article on the same subject in another language version.
  3. New articles will have to be at least 2,000 characters long (without tables, infoboxes etc.)
  4. At the end of the contest, every Wikipedian having contributed to a chain gets as many points as the number of different language versions in that chain.
  5. The Wikipedian having acquired most points will be the winner.

How to play

You have two options to play the game:

  • Starting a new chain: To start a new chain, please check first that no one else started a chain on your topic. If not, add a new line to the list of nominated chains. Enter the name of the article, your signature and leave a short notice about your motivation to choose this special article (optional). The better motivation, the better chance of having "your" topic continued on other language versions.
  • Contributing to an existing chain: After having chosen a topic from the nomination list and having created an article in a new language, add it to the list on [this subpage] and it will automatically be added to the [score page].

Prizes

Below you'll find a list of all prizes for the participants of the Wikipedia Language Challenge. Donating a prize is really simple: Please add a short description of your donation and sign your post.

Click here to add a prize

As this will be an international contest, donors are encouraged to donate prizes which are country-specific (imagine a Wikipedian from Sweden winning Coffee donated by a Wikipedian from Turkey or a participant from Argentina winning a bottle of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye donated by someone from Russia). Of course, prizes can also be everything related to Wikipedia (Wikipedia T-Shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) or everything you think would make a Wikipedian from another part of the world happy.

  1. Please add your donation and sign here

Time scale

  • Start of the contest: December 1, 2008
  • End of the contest: December 31, 2008