The following rules may be copied or modified to custom fit your contest. Create the rules on a sub page of your contest
at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/xxx Contest/Rules or Wikipedia:WikiProject xxx/xxx Contest/Rules. It is important to be clear on what the requirements are for articles in terms of length, quality standards, submission dates and that the articles submitted meet notability guidelines and use reliable sources.
- Articles must be in the mainspace by the end of the competition period. Contestants are welcome to work on articles in AFC, draft space, their sandboxes or off-wiki in advance but the new articles have to be in the mainspace during the duration of the contest.
- The minimum requirement of readable prose for new articles is 1000 characters or 1kB. Though this is still a stub, as long as the articles have a number of sourced facts this is permitable. Try to make the articles at least 1500 characters or 1.5kB and effectively start class entries if there are plenty of sources. The minimum requirement is intended more for those developing world bios where subjects might be notable but suffer from a lack of sources due to the infrastructure of the countries.
- All entries are expected to be fully sourced, no unsourced claims or poorly formatted sources such as bare URL links or missing publisher information. Try to make the formatting consistent with dates and layout, clean, useful new entries are what the contest is about.
- It is important that before starting new entries you take the time to ensure that articles meet Wikipedia:Notability guidelines and have the adequate coverage in Wikipedia:Reliable sources needed to be acceptable on Wikipedia. We don't want the contest to generate non notable articles or cause WP:BLP issues. Leading up to the start of the contest there are prizes for editors who help build and refine the missing article lists for the contest with articles which are notable and make it easier for editors to select suitable articles during the contest.
- Take extra care to avoid paraphrasing and copyright. If producing a lot of content it is sometimes difficult to avoid sentences at times which don't resemble something in a source but it is important that the articles are without problems and will stick around on Wikipedia for a long time to come. If editors are found to create successive articles with paraphrasing or quality issues or of dubious notability and continue to do so after being alerted of a problem, they may be disqualified from further contributing to the contest. It is very important that care is taken to avoid copyright issues and ensure that articles meet notability and content requirements as if they don't they may cause a potential nightmare for the contest and editors at a later date.
- Cookie-cutter style articles which show signs of minimal text writing and simply quickly changing some facts to mass generate a lot of articles on the same subject or entries which show signs of cheating may be discounted. Though articles on the same subject (such as women athletes) may often have a similar format and facts, the articles submitted must demonstrate original text and that some time has been taken to write them. If using public domain sources this must be rewritten to comply at least if you're competing in the contest.
- No automated, semi-automated tools, scripts or manual templates to mass generate content are permitted for the contest. Any indication that editors are cheating by using a cookie-cutter template or script to mass generate through lists may lead to disqualification.
- To be eligible to win prizes for quantity, all articles are expected to be of a high quality, even if short. It cannot simply be "whoever produces the most articles, regardless of prose quality is the winner". All of the entries have to be satisfactory to read and be reliably sourced/reliable new entries. If English isn't your native language, consider recruiting a few experienced editors to help copyedit your work.