Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5056929-20130104120051/@comment-4795804-20130104124139

I repeat my opinion mentioned on the Thread:30891:

In general, when the badge system is enabled, actions such as adding images, categorizing pages or editing Bloons pages are prefered, because people get more points for that and therefore some people do rather a lot of cheap edits just to get more points and achievements. Even if these small fixing actions are mostly needed and helpful too, the people doing this job shouldn't be counted as more helpful just because they made more contributions or they made the special kind of contributions. Some people on the Special:Leaderboard got their high place thanks to these fast cheap edits, while some other people who really created anything or who are active on the blog posts or who edit templates do not appear there.

Also, on the Special:Leaderboard there are many people who haven't been much active in several months, however it is not possible to remove them from the list to clear the place for any new people who are still active. Actually people have to get around 1000 points to appear on the leaderboard which motivates them rather to do a lot of the fast cheap edits than to help the wiki.

I think that the badge system no longer motivates people to be helpful, and the effect can often be exactly the opposite, so my opinion is: Remove the badge system.