Newsletter compiled and written by Tristan Thomas. Any suggestions welcomed.
The contest so far
As of this newsletter, the Writing Contest 2010 participants have collected a total of 111 articles.
This Week
Brian McNeil reports on the first week; as the instigator and main organiser of the competition, he has a large interest in its continuing success.
Wikinews' 2010 writing contest got off to a brisk start this week with entrants scheming to have the first post-midnight submission.
A particularly high number of barely-qualifying articles on the first day saw a notable record sent for the most articles published in one day since the introduction of Flagged Revisions.
Tristan Thomas upped the stakes on the second day of competition with an original reporting interview scoring 26 points and moving him near the top of the leaderboard with only one article, as-compared to others prolifically contributing short 3-point articles.
Reviewing is, at the moment, the most problematic issue with the competition. This can be as time-consuming as the actual creation of an article when copyediting for active voice, formatting per the style guide, and reading all cited sources. Competition entrants are strongly advised to ensure their browser supports a spell-checker; beware developing offline with a word processor that uses 'smart quotes' and other nonstandard characters; only cite the sources needed; review all copyedit changes to their articles done during, and after, the review process; and, to ensure they are very familiar with the style guide.
With only thirteen competitors on the scoreboard at the end of the first week, where are all the entrants? Comprehensive and in-depth submissions could easily change the leader positions. The current top five are Tempodivalse, Dendodge, Bencherlite, Pmlineditor and Microchip08.