This could be solved by awarding users with, for
example, most articles that
made it to the main page. They are already
pre-selected by humans as good
articles.
I strongly dislike this idea, for two reasons. First
of all, it kind of implies ownership of articles.
I've never written a featured article, but I've done
major copyedits to some of them. This seems to imply
that my cleaning is less valuable than other work. It
implies that one author or several "own" the article,
and that I'm around as a junior partner.
That leads to my second objection. It would be hard
to build any kind of award system that didn't reward
one type of editing over another. For instance, I'm
not a huge fan of writing articles. I've not started
nearly as many as some here, and the ones I have
started are, for the most part, not as detailed. On
the other hand, I'm right up there in terms of
NPOVing, cleaning up phrasing, activity on cleanup, RC
Patrol, etc. How can we avoid bias in awards such
that one type of activity (say, activity on
[[Wikipedia:Cleanup]]) isn't rewarded more or less
heavily than another (say, writing detailed
biographies of historical figures).
IMO, any kind of award system we adopt (if any) should
be strictly informal--if we adopt one at all. Given
that our other major problem seems to be excluding new
users, maybe we shouldn't have this at all. I'm not
sure this is necessary, but if it is, it should be
strictly limited.
=====
"The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be sneezed
at."
--George Will, on hyphen use
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