I think there's a gap between the OP's question about "recruiting gamers" ("including console, LAN, FPS, MMORPG, and mobile gamers") and the range of ideas offered about ["]gamification["] of WP editing.

But I think it could be useful to return to the initial question, and think more about what the experience of "gamers" is like, and what this does or doesn't have to do with Wiki{p,m}edia.

James Gee: "People are quite poor at understanding and remembering information they have received out of context or too long before they can make use of it.  Good games never do this to players, but find ways to put information inside the worlds the players move through, and make clear the meaning of such information and how it applies to that world."

To me this suggests further questions:

(1 - about gamers) What causes people to contribute texts in-game or para-game?

(2 - about game designers) What motivates people to *author* "good games" in the first place?

(3 - about wiki) Can people author "good games" that take place on Wiki{p,m}edia?

I can imagine a site called WikiGame that people can use to create game scenarios that take place partly in the real world and partly in Wikipedia.  This has less to with gamification of Wikipedia editing and more to do with creating fun games that involve writing.

On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 1:54 AM, Steven Walling <swalling@wikimedia.org> wrote:

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond@gmail.com> wrote:

Wikicup is highly structured and targeted towards improving quality and attracts only a small number of participants. It appears to be targeting existing editors to make better quality contributions. So it’s certainly an example of gamification, but not one that’s likely to find “mass appeal” or attract/motivate new editors.

 

I think if we are looking for “mass appeal” then I think we need to look at “casual gaming” and what makes them tick. Why do people play little short-play games? What’s the equivalent for Wikipedia? Could we create a “game” that throws up a random “citation needed” (perhaps in a particular category) and asks for a URL that supports the claim? The game would have to have other “players” checking the citation or else people would upload any old URL. Maybe it could be structured along the lines of Yahoo Answers, where the “players” get Best Answer statistics and can be on leaderboards for different categories of content. There’s a nice match here to Wikipedia since we already have categories.

 

I think Kerry is on the right track here. WikiCup, the Core Contest etc. are really cool, but they're at the highest end of the quality/difficulty spectrum when it comes to motivating users. 

A few projects at WMF that have touched on gamification elements:

1. Mobile "microcontributions". This is primarily in the planning stage, but there are variety of small, simple, repeatable things that are potentially easy to do on mobile. This fits with the mindset of mobile gaming, where people intermittently play games to pass the time on transit, waiting in line, etc. More info: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Mobile_engineering/Strategy/2013-2014_planning#Micro-Contributions
2. Our Getting Started workflow for onboarding new users. Try it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:GettingStarted One of the ideas we'll be testing next is a progress bar, which encourages users to complete learning five edits to learn each task type. Right now, we see editors use the "Try another article" function on the toolbar to skip around and edit multiple articles within a particular workflow, such as copyediting or adding wikilinks. There's very little stopping us from adapting this in to a perpetually available "game" associated with the many todo items in Wikipedia:Backlog, after we've figured out how best to apply to the new editor onboarding experience. 
3. The Education Program experimented with leaderboards for students. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Canada_Education_Program/Leaderboard&oldid=487269755 Based on feedback from students this was a motivator, but it needs to be tested in a controlled way for regular editors, as we know that student activity and retention follows very different patterns compared to editors not introduced to editing via a classroom assignment. This is one of those things we should test with a degree of caution, as competition is not always friendly and positive. 
4. Many people have brought up the idea of hooking up Mozilla's Open Badges architecture to Wikimedia projects. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BADGE and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Badges

There are probably others I'm forgetting. 

--

Steven Walling

https://wikimediafoundation.org/

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