Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-4651179-20160117181041/@comment-61022-20160120205949

Ugh, badge hunters.

Here's an extreme idea: Can we (at least temporarily) eliminate badge awards that are triggered by adding categories? Maybe if we deflate a badge hunter's incentive to go hog wild, at least for a short period, they'll just go away because the incentive is gone.

Perhaps retooling the badge and ranking system to increase qualifiers. Anyone can just add categories, maybe if we yanked the most abused badges people will work harder to earn them and make more substantial edits.

I've never been a fan of the "award" system for encouraging people to make edits because of abuses like this. People aren't adding content for the betterment of the wiki, or adding new content, they're just looking to score points. I feel that people should be adding material for the love of the content, not because there is some kind of reward to be had.

I feel badges in and of themselves are logistical nightmare and has backfired on us because now we've got all these people on here that only add categories to things. They don't add anything but categories. They'll never write a summary, or put a reference tag on anything.

While categories are a useful tool -- generally speaking -- they lead to so many hassles, people over generalizing things, edit wars and just other time wasting nonsense.

I would propose all the General Category Badges be scrapped. Also if there is a way to put on stricter measures of badge awards... Like if there is a character threshold. Example: The "One-Shot Collector" badge is only awarded if the addition to page in question is over 1000 characters.

Alternatively, is there a way we can set it there's a stop gap in place wherein if a user hits a badge target the system notifies an admin and the admin can then peer review and determine if that person legitimately deserves a badge?

In short, aside from outright scrapping the badges, at the end of the day I think we should be rewarding hard work. If we repurposed badges to be awarded for the AMOUNT of content as opposed to simply adding content perhaps we can neuter the people who abuse these recognitions for trivial purposes.