Whether you’re looking to achieve glorious victory through competition or just need a nudge to make that wiki page that you’ve been putting off for months now, the TSPedia Writing Competition is here to celebrate and encourage the roleplaying side of TSP by expanding the breadth of lore on its wiki and giving its writers a chance to shine. Without further ado, here are the details:
What’s the competition?
The competition prompt is simple: write a page on TSPedia pertaining to a branch of your roleplay nation’s armed forces. RL example pages include this, this, and this. Nations from any of the three TSPRP canons (Pacifica, A1-0, and Aurora) may be entered. Each roleplayer may submit a total of one entry, which will be judged by a panel of three judges according to set criteria.
What are the rules?
Your entry must be your own work. You must be the overwhelming primary author of your entry, content in your entry must not be plagiarized from other TSPRP roleplayers or any other source, and you must write the entry yourself. Violations of this rule will result in immediate disqualification.
Each roleplayer may submit only one entry. You may be change which page that you are entering prior to the due date by notification to the judges.
Entries must be eligible TSPedia wiki pages outside the bounds of this competition; that is, they must be for a roleplay nation in the Pacifica, A1-0, or Aurora canons of TSPRP.
Preexisting pages may be entered for consideration.
How will the judging work?
The panel of judges will consist of me (@RobbyTheSeal), @KingTEM, and @Qwert. The criteria that pages will be judged by consists of:
Believability/self-consistency: The subject and content of the page should be realistic (Pacifica) or be consistent with both itself and the canon that it’s in (A1-0 and Aurora). The entry should stand as an acceptable wiki page for its subject and canon, even outside the bounds of this competition.
Attention to detail: The page should demonstrate attention to detail: it should show that thought, consideration, and research went into its writing, and that content like statistical figures is backed by some type of logic or reasoning.
Wiki page quality: The page should be a good wiki page: it should be well-organized, easy to read, have good connectivity and links with other pages, and maintain a generally encyclopedic tone and writing style. One or more images should also be used.
Creativity: The page should make an effort to go beyond just the basics. It should be creative, consider the less well-known aspects of its subject, and integrate unusual or interesting details in a fluent way.
Page length: Greater page size does not necessarily mean more points unless it adds value to the page, but a page should at minimum be long enough to both give a broad overview of its subject and demonstrate the other criteria listed above. A recommended ballpark minimum would be 7,000 B to 10,000 B.
What’s the time frame?
Entries are for the competition are due by 2024-01-04T04:59:00Z. Pages on TSPedia can be entered by replying to this thread with a link to the page, after which its newest version as of the above posted due date will be considered by the judges. After the entries are judged, the results will be posted here.
With that, the rules are over. It is my hope that you will choose to be a part of this event, and that you will enjoy your participation here!
I’m a little confused — is this only for completely new pages, or can we submit existing articles that we expand in the coming weeks?
For instance, I have minimal stubs for Esfalsa’s army, navy, and air force. Would I be allowed to submit those articles, or would they be disqualified since they already existed before the start of the competition?
Because of the lack of preexisting pages that are both eligible to be entered and large/detailed enough to provide a noticeable competitive edge, preexisting pages are eligible for entry in this competition. In other words, you’re free to enter any one of your mentioned pages if you wish; I apologize for the ambiguity, and will work on making a more permanent rule regarding preexisting pages for any similar events in the future.
Hello again, everyone! With the passing of the deadline for the provision of page entries, it’s now time for me to officially close the writing period and compile the finalized list of competitors:
These entries will be judged according to their latest revision made before the TSPedia display date 05:00, 4 January 2024.
The judging will proceed as soon as we get a chance to evaluate each entry according to the criteria set forth in the competition OP. In the meantime, I would like to thank each of the participants for taking the time and effort to write entries for this event; you’ve all created a much better ensemble of entries than I could have expected, and your writing reflects well on the skills of both yourselves and TSPRP as a whole.
side notes
I have a few important side notes regarding future competitions:
I had to manually submit two pages which were previously stated as being intended to be entered in this competition. I stated in both the competition OP and the deadline reminder on Discord that entries needed to be posted in this thread to be counted; I understand that this is the first event of its format, but please remember to enter your pages in future competitions. Pages are registered in this way in order to ensure that organizers do not lose track of which pages are supposed to be counted as entries, and I cannot guarantee that any unregistered entries will be counted in future events.
TSPRP pages are sometimes made by copy-pasting another page and then editing its paragraph content accordingly. While I understand that this is a somewhat widespread practice on TSPedia and while it does not fall afoul of the plagiarism rules when the page is revised enough to be original, please ensure that any leftover, un-revised content from the original page is removed by the deadline for any future events.
After much delay due to issues with TSPedia, scheduling, and other things, the time has finally come to announce the scoring! Below is a ranked list showing each competition entry, along with the scores that it received from the judging committee.
I would like to formally congratulate Maverick for winning first place with an outstanding wiki page for the Royal Star Navy, as well as Caca, Izaakia, Flaming, Kobegr01, and Pronoun for writing their own entries. This competition is now officially concluded, but I hope to facilitate additional events of this nature in the future once the process is refined; in the meantime, we at the judges’ committee hope that the competitors and other roleplayers of TSPRP continue to enjoy writing in TSPedia and participating in the TSPRP community.
While I’m gald to have won the wiki contest, indeed I even enjoyed competing in it, I must insist that I cannot have a 15/15 on Realism/self-consistency as I’ve made an error regarding established lore within the SSK. This pertains to the rule shown below requiring consistency with the established canon which also extends to established lore within star nations to my interpretation.
As such, I’ve made the error of calling the Aldana Warp Field Drive, attributed to Rodrigo Aldana on the main Stoinian Star Kingdom wiki page, as the Acana warp drive in competing article of the Royal Star Navy. This in my opinion is anything but consistent despite the WIP nature of both articles.
Therefore, honour demands I bring this inconsistency forward and ask the judging committee to re-evaluate the believability/self-consistency of my entry in the competition.
This is a statement to confirm that the judging committee has received a regrading request for the RSN entry, and that each judge will thus be asked whether they wish to revise their scoring of the entry in question on the grounds of the provided materials.
