The results are in! My AniWiki project placed second in the Waxy Automated Wikipedia Contest. The first place entry was really smooth and nicely put together, but I was able to get some scraps based purely on technical development, which is cool.

Although John Resig’s AniWiki entry had several innovations, Dan wins because of the elegant Wikipedia integration and the ease of use. Dan’s entry was the first to use a slider for navigation, allowing you to scrub across revisions with changes reflected in real-time, and I like the ability to switch between selected arbitrary ranges using the existing Wikipedia buttons or the entire revision history. It looks like a seamless part of Wikipedia. He’ll receive $200, one Flickr Pro account, a $20 Threadless gift certificate, and the Socialtext Starter package.

Second place goes to John Resig’s innovative AniWiki. Although I didn’t like the slideshow navigation as much, I was blown away by his graphical chart of activity over time and the visual diffs written entirely in Javascript. (Dan Phiffer was inspired to add that same feature to his script after seeing John’s implementation.) For his excellent work, John will receive $50 and a Flickr Pro account.

Probably the best feature to come out of the contest is the highly-usable Javascript Diff Algorithm that I made – and I’m sure will get some use all around the ‘net. On a side note, I really hope these sort of ‘lazyweb-free-for-all’ contests happen more often, I really enjoyed myself and got some cash for my hard work. Maybe there should be a web site dedicated to managing these mini-contests…. anyone?