Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon/Rules

This contest runs from 0:00 UTC +0 time on October 15 to 23:59 UTC +0 time on November 27. Articles which are improved in line with the rules below, within this period, may be added to contestants' progress lists, which are found (or which you can create for yourself) beneath the appropriate country on any of five country 'entries' pages, or on the 'special claims' page:

• Entries for countries A to D
• Entries for countries E to K
• Entries for countries L to R
• Entries for countries S to T
• Entries for countries U to Z & misc.
• Entries for special claims (see Competition and entry process, below.)

• The scope of the competition is limited to stub improvements and the creation of better-than-stub biographies of women, where the article subject is clearly related to one or more African countries.

• Improvement must be seen in mainspace within with competition period. Contestants are welcome to work on articles in their sandboxes or off-wiki in advance but the actual improvement work to the articles or women new articles have to be done in the mainspace between those dates.

• The definition of stubs in scope for this competition is articles with less than 1,500 characters or 1.5kB size. They may or may not be tagged as stubs; absence of a stub tag is unimportant; they still count.

• Articles which are incorrectly tagged as stubs may be counted. Many articles tagged as stubs are longer than 1,500 characters or 1.5kB size. They may be listed as entries as long as there is evidence of effort being put into any of improving and expanding the text, adding sources, improving references and categorisation; and then removing the stub tag and amending talk-page wikiproject tags.

• There is no minimum expansion requirement, but the article must have over 1.5 kB (1,500 characters) of readable prose when you've finished. Readable prose does not include references, infoboxes, tables, lists, etc

• To qualify as a "destub" for listing here, the article must be over 1.5 kB (1500 characters) of readable prose and must meet the quality requirement below. Readable prose excludes the size of citations and references, infoboxes, image captions, tables, lists, etc.

• The minimum quality requirement is that entries must be well-formed Start class articles, or better. You are expected to have validated existing content, copyedited where necessary and verified that sources are reliable. The article will be correctly referenced with citations properly drawn up and filled out - no bare URLs, no poorly formatted sources. Clean sourcing is one of the most important aspects of this competition. The article will be appropriately categorised. The article stub tag will be removed, and any talk-page wikiproject tags will reflect the finished article class. Articles will be rejected if they do not meet these minimal requirements.

• An article can be listed as an entry only once, under a single contestant and a single country. Articles which relate to a number of countries should be listed under a single country of your choosing.

• All contestants are free to work on any or all the countries they wish; there are per-country prizes to be won!

• Improvements can be made to articles on any language wiki, not just en.wikipedia. Entries in all languages, especially French, are welcome, but you must ensure that the articles strictly comply with the rules of the contest. Many other wikis have lower standards for sourcing, but for the contest the articles will have to have the same quality standards as on here to make it a fair contest. Articles which have substandard sourcing or formatted references may be rejected.

• New biographies of women are in scope for the competition. Other new articles are not in scope and will not be considered. Biographies of women are in scope as part of Wikipedia's effort to redress the imbalance between biographies of women and men. New biographies entered for this competition will meet the spirit of the rules above; more than 1,500 characters of readable prose, well-formed, well sourced, etc. New biographies should be listed under the appropriate country, and marked as new - e.g. (N). Note, however, that the overall goal of this competition is to reduce existing stubs (the clue is in the name - destubathon), and the preference of the organiser is that we work on existing women stub articles in preference to new articles.

• Judges decisions are final.

Competition and entry process

There are two sets of competitions within the destubathon. The first is a country-by-country competition for the most destubs. The second are a set of 'special claims' competitions which work Africa-wide, including the:

• most geography and wildlife articles destubbed
• most women biographies destubbed
• most core articles destubbed. (Core articles are those which were rated as Top, High or Medium importance in the Wikiproject Africa talk-page tag at the start of the competition.)

The prizes and bonuses page provides fuller information on the competitions; however all of the competitions rely on competitors completing the following process. Once an article has been "destubbed" you should:

• Add the article under your username against the appropriate country on one of the entries pages
• include a url diff and brief explanation of the work you've done
• include the final prose count in characters
• If it is a core article then
  • embolden your entry when listing on the entries page.
  • remove the article from the core stub list so other editors don't try to work on the same article at a later date!

• If you want to enter the article into any of the 'special claims' competitions, you must list the article a second time in the appropriate section of the Entries for special claims page.

• Finally, please add your article to the Article achievements section of the main page.

• The intention is that the contest fuels the goal to see 10,000 improvements for Africa. If you do not wish your articles to be listed on this page, mark (No) after you name on the participants page and your wish will be respected. If you do not mark it, it is assumed you are happy for it to be listed on the 10,000 Challenge.