RFC: Personal goals
Compare: Thread:Support/breaking_up_MediaWiki_to_smaller_projects.
Just an idea: let users to set personal goal for how many edits they want to do per month (with some granularity like 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 50, 100). If that goal has been met in every consecutive month for, say, six months, they would get some praise, like for example a mention in our newsletter.
The purpose of course is to get them contribute regularly, even in the expense of huge one time contributions. What do you think?
I don't think that setting a personal goal would be useful for myself. Is it possible to ask translators to say whether they would find this useful or not?
The idea itself seems quite interesting, but as we have just been reminded by Irshgrl500 our help pages still needs work. Maybe we should be concentrating on improving these first?
The problem is that the goat is guarding the cabbage patch. There doesn't seem to be any good user centric documentation writers among us.
We need lots of new ideas, and then we can implement the best ones we can actually do.
I don't see how improving documentation is in contrast with this proposal.
The problem is certainly worth an effort (do I need to explain why?) and the idea is nice, especially if users were sent reminders of their goals and what they need to achieve them. Many users are not accustomed to goal-setting and they wouldn't even start to use the feature, so I'd suggest to set goals automatically (based on past activity and what we think is most sensible), with the possibility to change them; users would be notified of the feature and asked to confirm the goal or change it, but if they don't they won't receive email reminders; the automatically-chosen goal should stay as a recommendation (Nike, you might remember this). The suggestion on TWN end makes it slightly more similar to a barnstar-giving and how praise works in general, so it helps to introduce the user to the system. Finally, I suggest to create more understandable and interesting goals, like translating a small extension (small goal) or all MediaWiki "core" messages of some language (100 a month for 5 months, quite big goal), providing a list of such extensions or languages or whatever (in random order or with some order of importance if we have one).
Is it worth reviving this thread?
It's something worth considering some day, I think. I guess the Translation UX would be the only concrete occasion in the foreseeable future, but even after that it's nice to track such proposals; move back to unconfirmed maybe?
I guess we could look into AchievementsII by Wikia. Not sure if these are the docs: http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Achievements. It's not impossible that this extensions requires a whole heap of other social and profile related extensions, in which case we probably won't be able to use it.
While I do not mind that this may be useful for some contributors, and it may be helpful for estimative planning of server ressources, and similar, it is not for me. I most often cannot forsee the amount of time available to me. It may be next to nothing for weeks and months, and may jump to several consecutive hours unexpectedly, when for example I am "suffering" from a travel delay while having internet access and nothing more important to do. This may not be typical, however. :-)