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)

---

Edit as of July 6th: Reformatted to make it easier to answer. Each question has its own section.

Distribution model

The best option here seems to be the nominate-and-approve basis. If there is any endorsements or objections to this, please post them here.

Distribution process

How

How should the discussion happen? Should it be done in instant-style IRC, or on a talk page or a forum or something?

When

Should the discussion happen on a regular basis or not? If it is, is a consensus expected to be reached every time? If it is not, when should it be considered that a consensus has been reached?

Visibility

Should all or parts of the process be visible to all users, or none of it? If this is done in IRC, should logs be visible?

Drops

Even if the "reunions" are made to be regular, the drops don't have to be. They can be randomized, though it may seem a bit silly. What do?