--- Sheldon Rampton sheldon.rampton@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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