Bitcoin.it Wiki Contributors' Award

The Contributors' Award was a contest offered by MagicalTux intended as a way to divide wiki donations among contributors.

It was intended to be awarded to anyone who had been contributing, except MagicalTux, bots, and anyone helping fine-tune the scoring after the deadline for a session had been reached. Contributors were invited to provide their bitcoin address on their user page so they could receive their coins when awarded.

Lost Funds

Two sessions were run, although neither paid out. The first session collected 420 BTC total, while the second collected 86 BTC. All funds were presumably lost in the 2014 MtGox theft.

Rules

Application

To apply to the Contributors Award, you needed to have a bitcoin address published on your user page. Only a bitcoin address put there by the user himself would be accepted. If someone else changed the bitcoin address, the bot would look in previous revisions of the page to find one edited by the user. The following format was required:

Contributors Award participant: 1....................

By applying to the Contributors Award users were assumed to confirm they could legally receive bitcoins in their jurisdiction and take full responsibility.

How were winners supposed to be decided

A bot would list most active contributors and rank them based on the amount of pages/lines/etc contributed. Only contributions that were not removed would be counted. The contributions would then be quickly checked by MagicalTux and a list of winners would be compiled and published within one week. Scoring would also be based on other parameters, see below.

Once the list was published, donations were supposed to be directed to the contributors within 3 days, after making sure the listed address for each contributor is correct. Contributors could choose to have their donations directed to somewhere else by directly putting the bitcoin address of the beneficiary of their choice. Contributors who did not publish a bitcoin address were not to be counted when the Contributors Award was shared between contributors.

Every contributor with serious contribution, no matter how small, were expected to receive a part of the award, except if excluded.

Sessions

A session was the period of time covered by a given award. Sessions were planned to last for one month, however this was subject to change to reflect the amount of donations received and work required to establish a list of winners.

Donations

The Contributors' Award fund was made only of donations from bitcoin users. Donations were to be held by Tibanne Co. Ltd. until winners had been decided, at which points the received amount was supposed to be split between contributors proportionally to their score.

Employees of Tibanne Co. Ltd. and their relatives were explicitly denied participation in the Contributors Award.

Direct donations

If users had a personal preference for a given contributor or felt this contributor is doing a great job, they were strongly encouraged to donate directly to the contributor.

Abuse

The wiki was to be be monitored at all time, so that anyone trying to artificially improve his own score, or artificially reduce someone else's score would be excluded from the Contributors Award. The goal of this award was to improve the community work around bitcoin, and not make this wiki a war zone. Should abuse become uncontainable, the contributors award was to be stopped, scoring computed up to the date the abuse started and bitcoins shared between honest members.

Scoring

The scoring for each contributor was to be made based on the following rules.

Text

Of course, text contributions were to take an important place in the scoring calculation. The following parameters would have been taken in account for each contribution:

• Insertion of bulks of text should be scored based on the amount of text submitted. The ratio would be reduced if the text is found on other sites via a search engine (ie. not original text) and based on the number of afterward corrections. If the text is completly removed (and not restored afterward) then it wouldn't be counted. Off-topic inclusions would also be ignored.
• Corrections (typo, etc) should be counted based on the volume of text they apply to, minus the amount of corrections made by other people afterward.
• Adding links to existing bulks of text would only count if the ratio of links is kept low (only the first link to a page on a given page would be counted)

Templates

Templates are an important part of the life of a wiki. Templates were to be scored on the following elements:

• The template must be original. Templates copied from other sites would not be counted.
• The template must be widely used. Scoring would be based on the number of other contributors using a given template.

New uses of a template from a previous session would still be awarded to the original contributors of that template.

Talk pages

Modifiers would be given to contributors based on the feedback they receive from users on talk pages. Remember to be courteous at all time for best effect. Those modifiers will be manually collected and only applied to the most notable contributors in order to avoid any abuse.