Wikimedia blog

News from inside the Wikimedia Foundation.org

Posts Tagged ‘contest’

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year Winners Announced

2,463 votes were cast by Wikimedians to decide the fifth annual Picture of the Year in the recent competition on the Wikimedia Commons.   All 783 pictures promoted to featured picture status in the previous year were included in the competition.  The organizing committee is pleased to announce the results, and would like to congratulate our winners.  Below are the winning images:

 

#1 - 241 votes in the final round | In mid-August 2010 ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky snapped this amazing photo at ESO’s Paranal Observatory. A group of astronomers were observing the center of the Milky Way using the laser guide star facility at Yepun, one of the four Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). (POTD) Credit: Yuri Beletsky

#2 - 180 votes in the final round | Stari Most, the "Old Bridge", which connects the two banks of river Neretva, has been a symbol of Mostar for centuries. This view from north shows Helebija tower to the left and Tara tower to the right. It was made from the minaret of Koski Mehmed Pasha Mosque. (POTD) Credit: Own work by Ramirez .

#3 - 170 votes in the final round | Sarychev Peak Volcano erupts June 12, 2009, on Matua Island (North Kuril Islands) (POTD) Credit: Original photo by NASA, uploaded on flickr by user John, derivative work by The High Fin Sperm Whale

The complete results are visible on the 2010 results page. The competition consisted of two voting rounds—Round 1 ended May 4th and Round 2 ended on June 7th. The Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year contest is an annual volunteer-led contest, running since 2006.  This year, more than 1,500 Wikimedians voted in the competition, a record turnout that exceeded the organizing committee’s goals.  The support of the Wikimedia community made this possible, and the organizers would like to thank everyone who participated.

The Wikimedia Commons is a media repository hosting content that anyone can share, reuse, and remix.  Wikimedia Commons editors nominate the best media for featured status in an ongoing project, and all featured pictures from the previous year are included in the annual Picture of the Year contest. The contest is a fun and enjoyable event that not only celebrates our excellent photographers and illustrators, but everyone who contributes to Wikimedia.  You are encouraged to donate your own work to the Wikimedia Commons as our library of freely licensed media files grows past 10,000,000 files. You can upload them yourself (details here) or email info-commons@wikimedia.org if you are the copyright-holder or maintainer of a freely-licensed media collection that you would like to donate to the Commons.

Post authored by: User: mono

Picture of the Year Organizing Team

 

Data Competition: Announcing the Wikipedia Participation Challenge

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Wikipedia Participation Challenge, a data modeling competition to develop an algorithm that predicts future editing activity on Wikipedia. The competition is hosted by Kaggle, a platform for data modeling and prediction competitions.  The Participation Challenge is open to community members and anyone else who is interested in analyzing Wikipedia data.  This is the first of two data competitions the Wikimedia Foundation will sponsor this year.

The goal of this competition is to gain a better understanding of the factors that encourage or discourage people from editing Wikipedia. Increasing the number of active editors is one of our strategic priorities. Both the Wikipedia communities and the Wikimedia Foundation stand to benefit from models that quantify the factors that determine whether a Wikipedia editor is likely to continue contributing. The competition asks contestants to develop a model to predict the number of edits a given editor will make in six month’s time.

The data used in this competition comes from the publicly available English Wikipedia XML data dump.  An anonymous donor has generously contributed $10,000 as prize money. There will be a Grand Prize for the best prediction, as well as special prizes awarded for the use of open source software. The Grand Prize winner will also be given the opportunity to present their prediction model at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining.  The competition starts today and will continue until September 20, 2011.

Head over to our competition portal, download the data, and start crunching the data! And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter: #wikichallenge and @dvanliere.

Howie Fung
Senior Product Manager, Wikimedia Foundation

Diederik van Liere
Research Consultant, Wikimedia Foundation