Karma

(Redirected from Meta:Karma)
(English) This is an essay. It expresses the opinions and ideas of some Wikimedians but may not have wide support. This is not policy on Meta, but it may be a policy or guideline on other Wikimedia projects. Feel free to update this page as needed, or use the discussion page to propose major changes.
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Karma is a term denoting points accumulated to one's account. At Wikimedia projects in various languages, such concepts include (but are not limited to):

Designed for contributors to award other contributors with barnstars for what they did well.
In fact, some content work is not noticed and hence appears less rewarding! And it's unconstructive to just thank where a human feedback on the actions could be useful instead...)
Total edit count, or that in namespaces.
Some people make large rare edits of content of use to the project and aren't as welcomed as they could've been.
  • Number of FAs you contributed to
Designed to motivate a contributor to expand existing articles.
Imposes excessive focus on FA criteria rather than on common sense.
People who only correct mistakes in articles or write stubs don't get this award, which is imbalanced.
Designed to do what edit count and barnstars do, at the same time... Shares pros and cons of both.
Designed to help new and inexperienced users by pairing them with more experienced Wikipedians.
This makes a newcomer feel “inexperienced”, in contrast to the mentor.
In fact, we are all learning, we're all more or less experienced...
Some reviews are more difficult. Scoring them all as 1 point is not balanced.
Quality > Quantity; this system gives more points for quantity instead.

These are disastrous, barbarous concepts; apart from being confusing, they mislead contributors' work. Examples are included, as an illustration of the concept.