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Forget the barnstars! -- Centiare is paying cold, hard cash for the best in wiki page design.

Presenting: The 2007 Centiare Prize in Wiki Content, Markup, and Design

Prizes

FIRST PRIZE = no less than $200

SECOND PRIZE = no less than $50

HONORABLE MENTIONS = At least two awards of $25

Rules

The contest is simple. Centiare is calling on contributors to create a new page on Centiare, utilizing all of your best skills in generating original content, applying wiki markup, and designing a beautiful page. You may choose any topic that is a legal entity, which has not yet been created on Centiare. This could include:

Yourself
Your Company
A Non-Profit Organization you admire
Your Hometown
Your Favorite Band
Your Favorite Artist
Your Favorite Website

The entry must be created in user-protected Directory space.

Entries that are found to have plagiarized copyrighted materials without permission will be disqualified, and the offending materials may be subject to removal from Centiare. That is, please do not copy any text, photos, music, or video from other sources (including Wikipedia) or copyright holders who retain the rights to that material. Copyrighted content may be used only if you carefully obtain express written permission from the owner for its use in Centiare. Frankly, we suggest you create everything yourself; that is, your own research, word smithing, photography, audio recording, etc.

Judges will be comprised of a five-person panel of long-time Centiare contributors, and they are not eligible for the prizes. Scoring will be based on five 4-point grades:

Quality of content (the writing is factual, well-organized, grammatically correct, and engaging to the reader)
Use of wiki markup (credit given for semantic tagging, use of wiki-linking to valid pages, headings, infoboxes, and tables)
Style and beauty (outstanding use of photos, audio, video, tables, graphics, color, backgrounds, etc.)
Monetization (how well does the page incorporate ways for the author to make money, without being overbearing; this may include marketing contact info, Google AdSense ads, Amazon Associates links, or even actual products or services for sale)
Overall reader experience (how a first-time visitor to Centiare would react to this page)

With 20 points per 5 judges, the best possible total score will be 100 points.

Deadlines

Applicants must submit their intention to participate before June 23, 2007 -- because the judges will need some advance idea of how many entries they will be reviewing. Applicants must then submit their one best page as their Contest entry, no later than midnight Eastern time, June 30, 2007. Intention and submission links will be taken on the Discussion page of this article. Only one submission per person is allowed. Judges will score all entries between July 1 and July 3, and the winners will be announced on July 4, 2007. We shall declare the "independence" of the world's best wiki editors from the "free labor" tyranny they have likely found elsewhere to date.

Corporate sponsors

This contest will be promoted with a "soft" launch and word-of-mouth advertising, up until May 15th. After that point, Centiare will be blitzing the Internet with promotional advertising, blog links, press releases, etc. Corporate sponsors who would like to donate additional money to our prize pool (in $25 increments) may do so prior to May 15th. All corporate sponsors will then receive prominent mention in our full-scale advertising efforts between May 16th and June 30th. Corporate donations will be distributed uniformly across all prize levels (that is, if $225 in corporate sponsorships are received, First Prize will increase to $275; Second Prize to $125; and there would be five Honorable Mentions of $25 each).

Judges

The judging will be executed by Karl Nagel, Gregory Kohs, Garrett Minks, Karen Kohs, and Cheryl Levy. Their voting will be by secret ballot. Disqualifications will be determined by a majority vote of the judging panel (3 out of 5). The decisions of the judges are final. Deadlock ties will be broken by Karl Nagel.