[WikiEN-l] Re: Edit war policy meaningless; incentives for good behaviour; wikimoney

Sat Mar 13 19:37:48 UTC 2004

--- Sheldon Rampton <sheldon.rampton at verizon.net>
wrote:
> 
> I wonder, though, if we could refocus our attention
> away from 
> strategies for punishing or controlling the behavior
> of people who 
> act badly, and instead look for ways to reward
> *good* behavior.

[snip]

> I propose creating a new category of "registered,
> confirmed users," 
> which would fall in between our current categories
> of "registered 
> users" and "sysops." These would be users who, in
> addition to basic 
> registration, have provided some confirmation that
> they are 
> verifiably unique individuals and not merely the
> umpteenth sock 
> puppet of Bird or some other game-player. 

I don't think this proposal does anything very
positive to encourage the things we want to see in
wikipedia.

I can see the logic behind it (although I think you
made some mistakes, non-sysops can move pages, and I
believe that sysop=admin, and the term you were
looking for in 4 should have been developer or
something like that).  But, at the moment sysops are
(or should be) trusted with certain adminstative tasks
but their opinions in article formation/ content
disputes etc should not be given any more weight than
those of any other users.

You're proposing a more overt status-system which in
my opinion is only going to get used to bash "lesser"
users over the head.  It's bad enough that people
already seem to think that sysopship is a status
symbol, I wouldn't like to see this developed any
further.

> There might be some other rewards that we could
> offer to encourage 
> good behavior. For example, we could have monthly
> prizes in various 
> categories, such as best new article; editor of the
> month; or most 
> congenial member of a non-mainstream religion (a
> category I've 
> created specially for Ed). The prizes could be small
> tokens of 
> appreciation such as coffee mugs, and wouldn't need
> to cost much. 
> Another possibility might be to encourage real-world
> interactions 
> between Wikipedians, for example by sponsoring
> social mixers in 
> different locales. If people start seeing the
> Wikipedia as a way to 
> actually get to know other people (and maybe even as
> a vehicle for 
> career networking), they'd probably feel greater
> incentive to behave 
> well. Maybe the social mixers could also double as
> fund-raisers.

Now, I like the idea of encouraging good behaviour in
such a positive way (prizes and fun things - at the
moment the barnstar is the only such thing I know of).
 :)

On a related note I was chatting in IRC yesterday
about wikimoney and how useless I find it.  I founded
a wikiproject which will involve the creation of
literally hundreds of new articles, finding hundreds
of images etc.  And what do I have to motivate people
to join in with this rather than any other
wikiactivity?  W17!  How about giving wikiprojects a
monthly allowence to be spent on incentives related to
that project?

Fabiform.

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