Team Fortress Wiki:Discussion/Wiki Cap

Bringing back this to life, we need to decide how to proceed on Wiki Cap distribution in the future.

A reminder of some now-established points:

• Using a list and a scoring system is broken, leads to unproductively competitive behavior from users, and to over-reliance on it from staff
• While distribution on a weekly basis seemed like a good idea to regulate the number of total Wiki Caps in existence, it had the side-effect of the community having the false expectation for it to happen without fail every week, and proved to be too slow at times, causing frustration
• The English and Russian parts of the Wiki being complete, there has been an issue of people creating work for themselves in order to get more edits
• The combination of these things turned the Wiki Cap into a standalone reason to edit, rather than a reward for doing so
• The Wiki Cap guidelines need to be rewritten

Here are some solutions that have come up in order to address those issues:

• Using a list and a scoring system is broken, leads to unproductively competitive behavior from users, and to over-reliance on it from staff
  •  Done: Delete the Wiki Cap candidates list, and stop using the Wiki Cap scoring script entirely
• While distribution on a weekly basis seemed like a good idea to regulate the number of total Wiki Caps in existence, it had the side-effect of the community having the false expectation for it to happen without fail every week, and proved to be too slow at times, causing frustration
  •  Done: Dispel the notion that drops will happen every week; we did that by not giving anything on June 26th
  • The frequency to give it may be irregular now. However, getting everyone together in order to decide on distribution requires a generally-agreed-upon moment when people are there, which may vary over time in order to keep it irregular
  • Volume/rarity concerns should be disregarded; even if all editors with over 500 edits or so got a Wiki Cap, it would still be considered a rare item
• The English and Russian parts of the Wiki being complete, there has been an issue of people creating work for themselves in order to get more edits
  •  Done The deletion of the list should help this, as edit count matters less now, and is less visible
• The combination of these things turned the Wiki Cap into a standalone reason to edit, rather than a reward for doing so
  • This needs to be more emphasized into the Wiki Cap guidelines
  • Rewarding users based on other things than editing (e.g. outstanding community contribution, à la Shugo (item icons), Michael (highlander team), or Benjamoose (promo material, graphics, general awesomeness))
  • This should make the "bias towards IRC members" more widely accepted, since IRC is a great way to get involved in more community-related matters other than pure editing. However, it should never be completely mandatory to use it
• The Wiki Cap guidelines need to be rewritten
  • This can only be done when all of the above is settled

The method most people were leaning towards as of the last discussion was to do it on a nominate-and-approve basis:

• Staff members (or maybe regular contributions?) can nominate people and explain the reasons behind the nomination
• The rest of the staff reviews the nomination and approves, or declines, explaining their decision in case of a "no".

Multiple questions arise:

• When and where does this discussion happen?
• Can regular contributors see it?
  • If yes, can they also nominate others?
• Does an approval require unanimity? Does it require a threshold of "yes"'s? Does a nomination expire if nobody says anything?

Last point: Robin said, in the email in which he talked about wiki cap distribution, that we may run any changes past by him. This is such a change, so his opinion should be taken into account before making any decision final. — Wind 11:43, 3 July 2011 (PDT)

"Can regular contributors see it?"

I'd say no, because things might get a bit ugly. "Only because of you I haven't got a Cap yet!" "Why does Moderator X hate me, I've done nothing against him?" --CruelCow ^(talk) 11:54, 3 July 2011 (PDT)