After ten months of near-constant article creation, expansion and review, the 2021 WikiCup drew to a close on October 31, with our new champion, The Rambling Man, claiming the trophy. Lee Vilenski achieved second place, forcing Amakuru into third position during the last few hours of the contest.
The WikiCup began humbly in 2007 with 12 competitors, scoring being based primarily on edit counts and unique page edits. The competition adopted its present form in 2009, with points awarded for featured articles, lists and pictures, along with good articles, In the news and Did you know. There were 60 contestants that year and 120 the next, and the contest has taken place annually ever since. Good article reviews were added in 2011 and featured article reviews in 2020. Over the course of the 2021 WikiCup the following content improvements have been achieved by participants: 88 featured articles, 19 featured lists, 528 featured article reviews, 493 good articles, 689 good article reviews, over 500 "Did you know" and 417 "In the news" items.* A thank-you goes out to all competitors for their hard work and the great benefit Wikipedia has received from their contributions.
The WikiCup will be held again next year, and editors may sign up now by adding their username and a flag of their choice to the signup list.
Some examples of the finalists' work in the last round....
The Rambling Man managed an incredible eight featured articles in the last round, all related to football and covering key matches from various seasons. Seen here is the Stade de France which hosted the final of one of these, the UEFA Euro 2016. In addition, he achieved three good topics (86 articles in total), and performed nearly 300 featured and good article reviews.
Cue sports featured heavily in the interests of finalists. Last year's WikiCup winner, Lee Vilenski was in second place this time, and certainly made a memorable showing! By his efforts, Lee managed to bring five articles on snooker to Featured Article status, including Snooker, a challenging task that brought him maximum points.
Amakuru, who finished in a close third place, was another soccer enthusiast with six featured and nine good articles. Not to be monotonous by showing only pictures of sport, here is the Coventry ring road at sunset, the subject of one of Amakuru's good articles.
Fifth-place Gog the Mild concentrated his efforts on articles related to battles. He raised four articles to featured article status and nine to good article, and also achieved a thirteen-article featured topic on the Hundred Years' War, 1345–1347, the Battle of Caen being pictured here.
Eighth-placed Bloom6132 concentrated his efforts on the In the news section of the main page; he garnered thirty-four ITN credits in the last round (two hundred and eighty-four in the competition as a whole). All of these were for recent deaths, such as the death of the jazz musician Lonnie Smith (pictured), who died on 28 September this year.
Note: these figures differ from this unofficial tool because Round 1 was improperly recorded by the bot.
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