Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-26489953-20160229073903/@comment-24808864-20160229175635

In my opinion badges/achievements should NEVER be reactivated on this wiki. ...Unless... someone can come up with a set of enforceable guidelines governing them. Furthermore, punishments for violating such guidelines must be applied to EVERYONE, both brand-new members AND Bcrats that have been here for years.

When I started here they were active and 90% of the fighting was about them. Once they were removed, we had almost complete peace on that front and much fewer meaningless edits to clean up on a daily basis. Now, the only silly competition is "who has the most edits" but at least no one can point at a badge list and say "look, I am important, because I made a bunch of meaningless edits that have no relevance to the actual future of the wiki." Almost all of our users are meaningful contributors to the content that do so out of their own goodness, not the desire for badges.

People should be editing on this wiki because they care about the content and want to improve material here to assist learners on the Khan Academy, not for a badge.

Shadow's idea is like a billion times better, and we on the sysop team do try to encourage good editors on the wiki as much as we can with recognition, praise, and promotion. Tibet is a very good designer and I think he has given many special badges based on performance which I greatly appreciate. I tried to give out "wiki-dollars" once in the past too! But my design skills are very weak!

I am sorry, the badge/acheievement list is one of the few things that can actually get me quite upset. The memory of what things used to be like.... it was disgusting... like a bunch of stray dogs fighting over scraps. It made me embarrassed to be associated with the community at that time.