Volunteer recognition

Many people would some recognition but only one (or a few) would get the full recognition with press releases and be featured as a top volunteer.

I don't think the a formal process to select monthly winner(s) to profile in a highly visible way would result in a better selection than a lottery anyway because there are simple too many people that all do massive amounts of high quality work.

How would be organize it so that every wiki had a way to select people to be in the running for Wikimedia volunteer of the month and then give every wiki a chance to vote on the people. I don't think that it is practical to put the organizational structure in to do this every month. I don't see how we can move from the local level selection process on hundreds of wikis with multiple collaborative projects to the next step where the people are thinned out for top recognition and profiles each month.

I think the best we can hope for is a process that lets many different Wikiprojects (and other collaborative projects) nominate their own best volunteers and then let a lottery do the final selection of the person for the Foundation to feature in a high profile way.

I'm open to ideas about how your idea would work but I'm skeptical that we can get from local projects to top Wikimedia volunteer in a fair process that gives every one a chance to be recognized for doing the same quality of work. I think it would be an arbitrary choice so I wanted to label it as such by using a lottery.

OK, I think you're on the verge of convincing me, FloNight.

I agree that there's a definite problem with finding the man-hours to actually assess people for recognition-worthiness. After all, we really want people spending time contributing to project content. Not meta or parallel stuff that could be regarded as tangential to our aims.

A lottery does seem to be a good way of relieving the burden of having volunteers spending hours and hours running through someone's contribs. Although it does occur to me that, currently, checking someone's contributions is a little slow; you basically have to click through from one to the next. If someone were able to bring up, say, 50 contribs at a time (showing the actual edit content, not just the summary) then that would be a valuable tool for assessing what a user has been doing.

I don't really have a firm or fixed position on this.