This wiki still needs a lot of work. There are countless of edits I'd like to make, but most of the time I don't have time or energy to do all the research and write the whole thing down. I wish that other, I mean new non-admin users, would help in this huge undertaking. However, most new users only add (useless) categories, speculation or reduntant statements. Still, I like to believe that those people are real Jurassic Park fans that would love to help us if they knew what to do and were better motivated. How do we manage that?
Wikia tried to give us a hand and gave us Badges! Badges are a very nice idea to encourage users to be more active and get some reward for their work. However, I have seen that it isn't working. The current Wikia Badge system can't check the quality of the edits it's rewarding. I have seen people making lots of VERY small edits to get their "100 Edits" badge. Some users add things like "......" to an article, an immediately removing it afterwards. (see Forum:Badges)
Still, I think a bagde system that would check for quality would certainly help improving our users performance. However, such a system can only be maintained manually by the admins. It will cost admins a lot of time to check user's edits and hand out rewards. However, if this will boast the quality and loyalty of our users, it will spare us time in the long run.
I would like to know what you think about this idea in general, and what kind of badges you would like to see. Please respond! This is what's being an admin is all about.
This is an idea that I have:
We use a system similar to Jurassic Park: Builder. We make a list is Missions. In these missions we clearly outline what we would like the editors to do.
If users succesfully fulfill a mission, we give them an amount of coins. The amount of coins is proportional to the amount of work the mission required.
Special missions that require a really large amount of work or intelligence, could also be rewarded with Dino Bucks.
Coins and Dino Bucks can be use to "buy" dinosaur pictures to put on their Wall of Achievements.
The amount of dinosaurs in your park would therefore repressent your status on this Wiki.
Coin:
Dino Buck: