A WikiCup for the Global South
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In early April, a few of us in the WikiCup thread of the Wikimedia Discord were discussing the problem of systemic bias on Wikipedia regarding postcolonial, economically emerging, and/or non-Anglophone countries. This is a common topic of complaint among both Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians, and for good reason; it's still a major weak spot for the English Wikipedia community. Epicgenius, one of the judges of this year's WikiCup, first suggested a contest focusing on developing countries on April 5th. Over the next few days, we brainstormed different ways to run this hypothetical contest: the name, the inclusion criteria, and scoring. Quite a few people chimed in, and Ixtal and I decided to BOLDly set up a project page, aiming for July–September to run the contest. Soon thereafter, we decided to recruit a third coordinator, TechnoSquirrel69; that ended up being a very good decision.
Initially we were thinking about calling it the "Global South WikiContest", but we soon realized that "global south" is too nebulous and subjective of a grouping, so we settled on the IMF's list of developing countries as a basis. We also decided to give bonus points for "least-developed" countries and for "higher-level" articles about broad topics relating to these developing countries, as both of those factors tend to be more challenging to write about. Some fun themed awards were also of course necessary.
While planning this back in April, we weren't expecting more than maybe twenty participants. Interest picked up in the Discord as July approached, and we refined the details on the contest's talk page. When we actually opened up for signups and TechnoSquirrel69 set up a watchlist notice, we ended up with around eighty participants, far more than we were prepared for. This actually ended up being fine as many of those who signed up didn't submit anything, but it was very exciting to us coordinators, as it indicated a desire to work on systemic bias.
The course of the contest was largely hiccup-free, and we didn't have to decline very many submissions. We weren't able to get a bot up and working in time either, so we manually updated the leaderboard as submissions came in. As I mentioned above, I was very happy that we had brought on TechnoSquirrel as a third coordinator, because I moved across the Atlantic Ocean at the end of August and was unable to properly keep up with submissions and discussion for a time.
After the contest wrapped up on September 30th, we opened a discussion on the talk page to get some feedback, and we've already gotten some great criticism, praise, and ideas.
I'm very happy we did this experimental contest. We ended up with three new featured articles (Qalaherriaq, Siege of Baghdad, and Genghis Khan!), ten new featured lists, 88 new good articles, and a truckload of article reviews and DYK nominations, all relating to parts of the world underserved by our encyclopedia—that's nothing to turn one's nose up at! I'd like to express my appreciation for my fellow coordinators, and Chaotic Enby for making our special "belt buckles" inspired by the map's resemblance to one.