Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Thursday 24 June 2004 21:30, Timwi wrote:
As an easy
example, try this: SETI Online offers online certificates for
work units completed. I am coming up on certificate four - 1000 work
units - and I'm excited.
This is significantly different from what I was referring to. It is
already technically possible for us to count the number of contributions
(I even keep an approximate value on my user page updated). However, it
is clear to everyone, troll or not, that these numbers don't mean
anything. Anyone can make tens of thousands of edits; the system does
not judge how meaningful each edit is.
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.
If you award *users* for what an *article* achieves, then minor
contributors to the article in question are going to feel left out.
In fact, I think the Featured Articles system is pretty clever in this
regard: it rewards the articles directly, the people only indirectly; it
judges the value of an article, but not that of a contributor. This way
every contributor to a Featured Article can be correspondingly proud
because they know their contribution helped make it Featured, and it
provides just the right incentive to do exactly what we should be
focussing on: writing good articles (as opposed to amassing awards).
Incidentally, I'm a little annoyed that an article I wrote has been
rejected from being Featured solely because it is an obscure topic. But
that's fine; I can still be proud that I've written this article, and
others can judge for themselves whether they think it's good or not. If
there had been a reward in it for me, personally, I'm sure it's clear I
would be quite a lot more annoyed for having been denied it, especially
if others got it just because their favourite topics are less obscure.
Timwi