Working out how to handle karma on wikis is something I spent a bunch of brain cycles on a while ago. If you use only likes over the whole article it becomes impossibly unwieldy to fairly divide credit for content once you have a number of different contributors. Having things broken into small pages helps, but with like-only it still gives too little opportunity for rewards to people improving a page, and misses the chance for valuable engagement/positive reinforcement.
My favorite idea so far is rewarding user's edits with points. To avoid too much distracting subjective choice on the value of edits, having the recent changes review team (a necessary as anti-vandal feature) select from a pre-set collection of categories of edit when they confirm that an edit is not vandalism (providing a nice place for positive social feedback "thanks for your edit, your karma has increased by ~reviewer", in a more universal and naturally integrated way than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks). Examples of type of edit (each has a default karma value, maybe an acceptable range for reviewer to pick from): Typo fix, Add citation, Add section, Reorganize, etc. The relative default karma reward for each type would be adjusted in a way which the community feels is balanced in a domain-specific way. I've got a bunch of details and explanations of how it would handle potential problems if this seems like something you're interested in?
Comments
Eric Bruylant
Working out how to handle karma on wikis is something I spent a bunch of brain cycles on a while ago. If you use only likes over the whole article it becomes impossibly unwieldy to fairly divide credit for content once you have a number of different contributors. Having things broken into small pages helps, but with like-only it still gives too little opportunity for rewards to people improving a page, and misses the chance for valuable engagement/positive reinforcement.
My favorite idea so far is rewarding user's edits with points. To avoid too much distracting subjective choice on the value of edits, having the recent changes review team (a necessary as anti-vandal feature) select from a pre-set collection of categories of edit when they confirm that an edit is not vandalism (providing a nice place for positive social feedback "thanks for your edit, your karma has increased by ~reviewer", in a more universal and naturally integrated way than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks). Examples of type of edit (each has a default karma value, maybe an acceptable range for reviewer to pick from): Typo fix, Add citation, Add section, Reorganize, etc. The relative default karma reward for each type would be adjusted in a way which the community feels is balanced in a domain-specific way. I've got a bunch of details and explanations of how it would handle potential problems if this seems like something you're interested in?