Grants:IdeaLab/Gamification

Inspire campaign

Gamification

Create a system that uses gamification that encourages both being nice and creating and contributing content and punishes harassment and hurtful comments.

idea creator• NeoTheThird

advisor• Takahiro4

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created on17:06, 4 June 2016 (UTC)

Project idea

What is the problem you're trying to solve?

Wikipedia is an awesome project that helps making knowledge broadly available. The Wikimedia Foundation is one of the last truly noncommercial Fortresses of the internet. A relict from the time before the internet became a place for big money.

Sadly, as always, where there's light, there's shadow. Many content contributors to Wikimedia projects experience harassment, such as threats, name calling, discrimination, stalking, and impersonation and others.

This poisons the atmosphere and keeps people from contributing to projects.

What is your solution?

This issue could be addressed with gamification.

"Gamification is the application of game-design elements and game principles in non-game contexts. Gamification commonly employs game design elements which are used in so called non-game contexts [...]." (Wikipedia)

For example, we could create an XP system, were all positive actions (Contributing, Helping others, etc.) are rewarded experience points that translate into ranks. Users who witness or experience harassment can then flag those bullies and they get taken away some XP.

So negative behavior is punished by taking away the credit they earned by contributing. We could also go one step further and create a feature were, if a users XP go below say, -100, they loose their accounts.

This could help make Wikimedia a nicer place.

Get Involved

About the idea creator

My name is NeoTheThird. I'm a german blogger and aspiring game developer. I'm not that experienced, so i won't be able to help in this project.

Participants

• Advisor *Bad thought should be downvote, good thought should be upvote like stackexchange.com. I am a gamer. Several game sites apply this system, but level-up system does not become my motivation. In Stackexchange.com, veteran user, normal user and newbie are distinct clearly. This situation may destroy wikipedia's neutrality. I could participate in english wikipedia, because wikipedian doesn't know I am non-native and newbie.
• Also at MMO, are newbies pvp to high-level user? At newgrounds.com, system of comment is very bad. kongregate, armorgame are some good, and in the q&a site I think quora is best. Takahiro4 (talk) 22:35, 6 June 2016 (UTC)

Endorsements

• I'd like to add something more.

Well, like those question-answer websites and communities, we can leave that responsibility of giving/taking away XP points on all Wiki-users. I'm a Quora user, so I've seen this on Quora. I mean, allow users to 'upvote' and 'downvote' other user's profiles. And so, when someone visits any user's profile they can get view on positive and negative points of that any specific user, and 'historical' actions of that user, how s/he gained positive and negative points. Allow all people to see, what's good and bad about any specific user, allow them to see what good and as well what 'bad' s/he has done with other fellow Wiki-users. It's kinda transparency. And so, allusers will get negative and positive reinforcement about their behaviour via those XP points. And they will not be able to hide their actions, and their points the've made by those actions. Somewhat kind of democracy, ya know. Giving users control. Only we will need to take care, is that one good person should not get label of 'bad' by other thousand 'bad' users. All people should be able to get help. And get noticed if that kind of 'unjust' happens to them. Good Luck. :) AmitMakwana008 (talk) 04:36, 5 June 2016 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is already somewhat of a game to me, which is a lot of the reason I'm here. Yes to more game elements! Telaneo (User talk page) 20:39, 6 June 2016 (UTC)
• I like this idea except the negative part, there are many articles where people team up on someone who tries to make the article neutral. They get on a bandwagon and although it can not be proved they attack people, the negative gaming aspect could actually promote harassment more. I think that sticking to a positive re-enforcement theme is the better way to go. Jadeslair (talk) 03:28, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
• The reputation based system employed by StackExchange has proven to be successful. Recommend similar implementation. David Condrey (talk) 07:16, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

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