Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-11008902-20141226235147/@comment-1738746-20150118081424

Timeoin wrote: I would finally like to just add, since I'm the only one old enough here to actually remember a time BEFORE these came out - other attempts were tried to try and encourage newbies, but as soon as we introduced this, we got a lot more regular editors. It's basically THE thing that helped us become what we are today. You make some good points Timeoin, though could I get more elaboration on this last point here as it's a bit general? I'm not very good at explaining myself, but what I was trying to get at is that while the badges are indeed an incentive, I'm not sure if they're a good incentive (as in promoting good article edits as opposed to bad article edits).

Since activity has increased, by how much as vandalism activity increased too? By how much have 'pointless' edits increased that have then lead to badge hunting accusations increased by? By how much has 'wrong' (edits that don't follow policies) editing increased? Has the increase in activity overall been more productive or has it caused a lot of problems along the way?