Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-24210732-20140215215306/@comment-3076045-20140216141946

Eganogard wrote: - Badges lead to trivial edits that need to be patrolled by staff. It's not just the badge-hunters who are affected. It creates more work for the wiki staff, which inadvertently leads to bad edits going unnoticed, and lowers the overall quality of the wiki. It is true. It does.

And the vast majority of people who edit on here do so with good intentions, and don't vandalise the wiki.

My question is this... if our concern is to keep the wiki from having low quality edits, why don't we do the following:  (Please note, I am NOT suggesting any of the following)

Make the wiki locked so that only registered editors can edit? (After all, we know that vandals are often unregistered editors.

Hmm... but it seems that that has not solved the problem, because we also get REGISTERED editors who vandalise, troll, or otherwise break wiki rules. Therefore, we must lock out all pages so that only moderators and administrators can edit pages - after all, its the only way to secure quality pages.

That's the argument that people on this thread are making - just to a less extreme degree. :)

And I'll end my argument by saying that it's actually quite difficult to badge hunt these days. When they were first introduced, we got excited by them, and wanted to add badges to, well, everything. There were ones for things such as the various races, the factions (mages guild, fighters guild, etc, etc, as well as a few other things. The end result was that it was actually possible to get 40+ points for making a single edit in certain pages, if they had enough categories in them. (The admins here, if they are so inclined, can still see them on the list of achievements - they are the ones that are not currently enabled - Wikia doesn't let us delete them altogether).