Board Thread:Consensus track/@comment-7153552-20130927224851/@comment-3186827-20131007101353

It's clear to me that that the contributions of a page editor and a forum user are so distinct, that a seperate criteria is required for each for any sort of nomination to be fair.

We know for a fact that there is very little crossover between forum users and page editors - meaning regular forum users don't regularly edit the mainspace and regular page editors don't regularly post on the forums. Because of this clear split, having a catch-all MOTM isn't working.

The idea is now to spilt the award into two. Editor of the Month and Forum member of the Month. Both with seperate and distinct criteria for what qualifies a person for nomination.

The current nomination guidelines are indeed outdated and not specific enough, even for page editors. These need fixed. 30 contributions is far far too low as a display of any kind of commitment to the wiki. Anyone could make 30 non-minor edits within a day. This figure should be at least 500.

All this talk about minor and non-minor edits - lets fact facts. Nobody is willing to go through all a nominee's edits and see if they are major or minor. We don't have the time for this. They way we have recognized past MOTM is firstly if their name is frequent in the Recent Changes. Admins and Patrollers are required to check the Recent Changes whenever they are on the wiki - and though this process we come to recognize certain new users and get a general feel of their contributions. It is from this we are able to judge if a new user is doing a good job and making major edits, or if they are just making minor edits. Nothing wrong with minor edits - but a user who is doing large edits should be recognized first and foremost. A new user who completely revamps a large lore page with 20 edits is far far far more valuable to this wiki than a user who makes 100 edits adding categories.

Now moving onto forum users. We can't judge forums users like mainspace editors as like I said, their contributions are competely different. It's is even harder to asertain the value of a forum editor's contributions because nobody is required to patrol every single forum post. Forum posters are free to post 1 word posts and nobody can stop them, or even notice. Because of this, the number of "edits" a forum poster has can't be used as a gauge for how well they contribue to the wiki.

Next is the criteria we need to set for a forum nominee. I have seen people nominate users in the past with obscure, vague and unsubstantiated reasons like: "He is funny and popular!" or "He brings lots of people to this wiki". These sorts of things simply cannot be measured empirically and should never be reasons for nominating a person.

If you guys are happy to cultivate this sort of culture and turn the forums into some sort of circlejerk, then go for it - but you are only shooting yourself in the foot. This sort of atmosphere attracts the wrong sorts of people to the site and eventually they become the majority. In no time the majority of the threads will be memes and jokes, and well thought out, informed discussions will be a thing of the past. Little cliques begin to form and they all vote for each other. Ultimately the good forums posters will leave when they find a better forum/message board. I have seen this happen countless times on the various message boards I have been part of over the years.

The only way I see we can judge a forum poster's contributions is internally - and than means deferring opinion to regular forum posters and particularly forum mods. Forum mods should have a general feel for a poster (much like admins and patrollers have a feel for certain editors) and I can trust them to be neutral.

Like most admins and patrollers, I don't post on the forums much. Because of this, I really have no idea if a forum user is contributing a lot to the forums i.e. helping users with game problems. Answering lore questions etc. I recognize maybe 2 regulars in the lore forums who are always answering questions. But most of the other forums seems to be all this RP stuff, which is it's own thing altogether.

I'm not qualified to have an opinion on most forum posters, so I would defer opinion to a forum mod. In the same way, most forum users don't patrol Recent Changes, so they have generally won't know if an editor is making good edits over the course of a month. We can be all hippy about it and say "This is a wiki! Everyones vote is relevant!" - but realistically you know that's not accurate. Remember, even Wikipedia is not a democracy.