RFC: Personal goals
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).