Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5056929-20130104120051/@comment-5334494-20130110224411

Spike144 wrote: The people who want to keep the badge system say that badges can attract more users to the wiki, but other question is what people the badges attract.

People should come to the wiki and make contributions there, because they want to help the wiki and make it a better place for people who want to find some information there. Wikis are mainly an encyclopedia about a specific topic, not a game where people earn some points to get a higher position in the table or leaderboard.

When the wiki has some sort of table of users, it is mostly a list of people who are able to help to other users that are new on the wiki. Sadly our Special:Leaderboard is not that kind of table. It doesn't look good for the wiki, when the first position in the table is ocupied by person, whose editing skills (after several months on the wiki) are equal to users who have been contributing just for several weeks. I really don't want to attract more people to the wiki who think that they should get some special rights here just because they occupy a high position in some table.

I totally agree with what you said there. I never exactly got perfect at editing...

Anyway, there seems to be 2 types of users in terms of editing;

1. Users that already edit perfectly after 1 week of being on the wiki; users like this later get user rights. Users like this also never get warned more than once.

1.5. Users between the two groups can have mixed traits of both groups. Users like this hang in the balance, just barely staying away from most warnings, although users like this usually still have a warning or two. Users like this tend to have good days and bad days, days with good contributions, and then days with slightly babish contributions. Users like this occasionally get Rollbacker rights, but users in this group rarely become admins.

1.75. About where I'd say I am in terms of groups. If I'm lucky, I might get user rights after 1 year, but that is kind of hoping too much. Just something to maybe hope for, or it's my mind going bananas.

2. Users that take a while, or never, develop perfect editing skills. This group includes users like badge hunters, spammers, vandals, trolls, etc. Users in this group usually get 2 or more warnings, and almost never get user rights.

Is this detailed enough?