[WikiEN-l] Re: Adminship as a reward

[bcorr at neaction.org]

Timwi wrote
> 
> 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

I think Timwi is generally right, but to go back to the beginning of this 
thread, I think that Meatball's pages "Reward Reputation," "Open Process," 
and "Us and Them"  have very good things to say about this topic. Rather than 
go on about my own opinions I'll just refer people there:

<http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?RewardReputation> 
<http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?UsAndThem>
<http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?OpenProcess>

Thanks, 
Brian (BCorr)