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Proposal Archive
The following proposal has been discussed and is now marked as resolved. The page has been protected and now serves as an archive. Do not edit this page.
Date Resolved: August 10, 2017
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Instructions
This is a page for creating and resolving concerns on the topic: "Badges (discussion 5)."
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Proposal
Now, for the fifth time. I am once again trying to attempt to disable badges. Let's label every reason separately to make this easier to understand.
1. Badges do encourage users to edit, but most of those edits are useless. Some edits such as changing "isn't" to "is not". People should edit to help and make this wiki better, not help themselves. To add informative pieces in a edit, or fix something that can harm the page. Not something useless. Why have that when you can have a medals system or not have anything at all? A lot of big wikis works fine without badges, and this is quite a large community. They encourage users to edit, but eventually users only start editing for badges and have no purpose on helping the wiki such as making galleries, adding information, or fixing something.
2. Adding a rule would do no use. Badges and the leader-board are the root problem, adding a rule to block people for badge milking is a bad idea. Badges are very vague, you can't tell if somebody is badge milking until they admit it. Editing for badges has no clear meaning because you'll never know what that user's objective is. Also, do you really want to go through a bunch of blocks and spam the IP block list for badge milking? They'll eventually continue to do it, and new users will also edit only for badges. The only way to stop the problem is to remove the badges themselves rather than blocking and warning innocent users for abusing the badges, and you don't know if they are unless if they admit it.
3. People are seeing this wiki as a competition and a game, which is isn't. This is a encyclopedia about SpongeBob SquarePants. This wiki shouldn't be defined as place where you go and just edit to earn badges and go up and up on the leader-board, but unfortunately that's what some users think. This wiki is not about competition, it is about editing and making it better.
4. As AMK has said before, badges do not consider quality edits. If you want to get rewarded for helping the wiki, User of the Month is that award for you. I don't see how badges increase wiki growth, but rather decrease and prevent it. It stops contributors who have the potential and chance of being good contributors. A big wiki like this, awards like this shouldn't be around. Would you rather want somebody improving a article, or see somebody add something very minor to a page and they get a badge? Sure, they drive users to contribute, but are those contributions actually helpful to the wiki? I don't think the wiki will get less edits either, because a lot of users do edit to help, but others may not but they can still edit. I don't see anybody that is going to stop editing because badges will be disabled.
Thank you for reading and I hope I considered all of you to disable badges and the leader-board. ⚡MightyMorphinJon⚡(message wall) 23:53, August 3, 2017 (UTC)