[WikiEN-l] Re: Adminship as a reward

[Timwi]

hcheney wrote:

> I propose that the community start issuing awards of
> merit to users that will be voted upon by the
> community over a period of a week. Some of the ideas I
> kicked around were...
> 
> the <i>Wikipedia Peace Prize</i> - for users who have
> worked to resolve conflict in the community.
> 
> the <i>Gutenberg Award</i> - for users that have
> extensively improved the main-namespace content of
> Wikipedia

The idea is quite nice and innovative, but I really don't think it'll 
work, for several reasons:

(1) The reasons Rick already mentioned.
(2) WikiMoney didn't work either.
(3) People will start doing certain things (e.g. make loads of trivial
     edits to the article namespace) *just* to get (one of) these awards,
     and then genuinely think they are entitled to (one of) these awards.
(4) Community recognition works best when it is not measurable. I can
     say with certainty that Anthere is more popular on Wikipedia than a
     vandal, but I can't rank her with other people. If she were awarded
     a "Wikipedia peace prize" and, say, Angela wasn't, then this would
     create an artificial (and deceptive) ranking between them.

Timwi