Proposal talk:Reward editors

Better tracking of article edits, linked to users' accounts?

I was toying with an idea. What if Wikipedia better tracked what users did, so that you would see a user name with a number of edits listed next to his/her name? That way, user would be able to assess how many edits you've made, how trustworthy they should perceive your work. This, in turn, would create an incentive/award for making more edits.

I could also see there being value in listing the top 3-4 contributors on each article page. For example, if a user made the second most edits on an article, his or her user name and edit count would appear on that page. Not only would this provide incentives to contribute, it would also allow readers to connect with the creators of the content, thereby enforcing a virtuous cycle of knowledge-sharing.

The first idea might add a bit of cruft to signatures. Perhaps number of edits could pop-up when you hover your mouse over a signature?

The second idea I like more as I think that info being on the article (or easily accessible from it) could be useful for any number of reasons. I think we could go even further than that by listing any users who have made, say, five or more edits to an article and providing a means to contact them all at once, for use when - for example - there is an RFC on the article content. --Bodnotbod 13:59, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 01:12, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

Good idea

This always makes a lot of sense just difficult to arrange. Money cannot be used because there are not enough of them to pay for the work accordingly (by the price they would cost if ordered). Some other means are needed, and it is a big work to find them. Likely one way of reward would be some Wikipedian status that (unlike administrator status) would be simply earned. Maybe trust metrics like the one in www.advogato.org would help? We still need to think that people with higher trust metrics should be allowed to do in addition but it would not make harm to give some non-enforcing rights like to view deleted articles Audriusa 15:02, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

Qualifications?

Many of the skills involved in editing Wikipedia would be relevant in real life, but the real life rewards would depend on the needs of the editors. I know one editor who answers job interview requests as to whether he is IT literate with "I'm an admin on Wikipedia". We have a lot of teenage editors who would benefit from real life references from Wikimedians they have worked with.

I think there is a big opportunity to work with a distance learning college such as en:the Open University, and introduce qualifications such as:

1. "research and citing" - students would research various topics and show they could find sources and update articles accordingly.
2. "English Language", Copy editing, fixing grammar and rewriting for clarity and brevity.
3. "foreign languages", If a university is teaching languages why not have a module where the coursework includes translating articles between different wikipedias.
4. "IT skills". templates, tables, and so forth
5. "Photography" submit your coursework via commons.

Older Wikipedians might well value an IT user qualification to show they have kept their skills up-to-date. Younger wikipedians might want to do a module that was accepted as a unit in their degree, diploma etc. WereSpielChequers 14:23, 2 November 2009 (UTC)

This is Volunteer Support

I like this proposal because it is about the fundamentals of volunteer management; believe it or not, what Wikipedia is facing is what all organizations that involve volunteers face, large and small. It confirms my earlier comments elsewhere: Wikipedia needs to explore traditional best practices in volunteer management and explore how to adapt them for their online volunteers (yes, Wikipedia contributors, whether we say it or not, are volunteers).

I added a suggestion for a certificate as a substitute for the academic degree proposed elsewhere without having read this yet, so it feels good to be on the same page as someone else.

I like the "Request for Assessment" idea. My fear is about people being assessed at a low grade because someone is out to make them feel bad. But still, it's a good idea and worth exploring.

Getting volunteers to put their role with Wikipedia on their resume -- I've been encouraging online volunteers to put their online roles on their resumes since the 1990s, and have heard from more than a few who have said they got asked about their online volunteering during job interviews, and they were convinced that they got the interview partly because of that online role. So it's completely appropriate to encourage editors to do this. In my professional work, I work with people who recognize the name Wikimedia immediately, and refer to it frequently, but are not contributors (either because it's too hard to use or they just would never think about doing it); they are the kind of people that would greatly value seeing "Wikipedia editor" on a resume. So, what I'm trying to say is, I agree very much with the idea in this proposal of encouraging people to see Wikipedia contribution as a value-added to them personally and professionally. Jcravens42 20:46, 23 November 2009 (UTC)