A perennial problem with Wikipedia is that its best articles are often not the most important ones. Editors are volunteers and write about whatever they are interested in, and often this does not coincide with what the readers are interested in. A good illustration of the issue is the article Newton's laws of motion: it is by far the most visible physics article, with circa 160k monthly views, but it's decidedly half-assed. On the other extreme, mechanical filter is pretty well-written, but has only 1k monthly views. See the "Research" section here for some hard data.
Of course we can't blame volunteers for working hard on less relevant topics, but we can incentivize them to direct their efforts where they'll make the most impact. Similarly to the old Core Contest, we have selected a list of articles in physics that are important, highly visible, and in a bad state, and we are offering prizes for their improvement.
The rules are: work on any of the articles in the list below, submit a diff of the work to this page, and nominate it as a Good Article or Featured Article until the 28th of February (AoE). If the nomination passes you get a prize of 20€ and are awarded the Science Barnstar. The prize can be claimed as cold hard cash in the form of a SEPA transfer if you have a bank account in the eurozone, or as an Amazon gift voucher otherwise. Prizes will be awarded up to the limit of 120€, in a first-come first-served basis. To prevent abuse we'll have a couple of judges (Tercer and XOR'easter) reviewing if the work was significant and the nomination process fair.
The list of articles to improve, together with the monthly page views:
- Newton's laws of motion - 160,228
- Quantum computing - 88,532
- Quantum entanglement - 81,777
- Temperature - 72,412
- Second law of thermodynamics - 69,152
- Electromagnetic radiation - 67,365
- Antimatter - 63,827
- Light - 63,584
- Energy - 62,007
- Chaos theory - 60,800
- Laser - 55,042
- Proton - 46,971
- State of matter - 45,106
- Momentum - 44,899
- Radioactive decay - 40,501
- Mass - 39,237
- Special relativity - 37,330
- Thermodynamics - 37,156
- Inertia - 32,015
- Neutron - 28,412
- Standard Model - 25,686
- Conservation of mass - 24,825
- Vacuum - 24,647
- Strong interaction - 17,313
If you want to improve an article that's not on this list, but thinks it fulfils the criteria, leave a message on the talk page and our judges will probably add it. Tercer (talk) 11:35, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
UPDATE: The deadline passed without a single submission, making the contest a complete failure. Clearly we should understand why before attempting anything similar in the future. Tercer (talk) 12:43, 9 March 2021 (UTC)
- @Tercer: These sort of things can be very hit-and-miss at times. Publicity is one thing, also writing about esoteric or tricky topics. The wiki movement also has a significant proportion of people telling/advising/urging others to write content without doing much themselves. Is tricky to figure how to redress the balance. Kudos for trying. Ultimately I do think contests are a great idea and have run a few myself. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 20:48, 13 April 2021 (UTC)