Team Fortress Wiki:Discussion/Wiki Cap

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Bringing back this to life, we need to decide how to proceed on Wiki Cap distribution in the future.


A reminder of some now-established points:

  • Using a list and a scoring system is broken, leads to unproductively competitive behavior from users, and to over-reliance on it from staff
  • While distribution on a weekly basis seemed like a good idea to regulate the number of total Wiki Caps in existence, it had the side-effect of the community having the false expectation for it to happen without fail every week, and proved to be too slow at times, causing frustration
  • The English and Russian parts of the Wiki being complete, there has been an issue of people creating work for themselves in order to get more edits
  • The combination of these things turned the Wiki Cap into a standalone reason to edit, rather than a reward for doing so
  • The Wiki Cap guidelines need to be rewritten


Here are some solutions that have come up in order to address those issues:

  • Using a list and a scoring system is broken, leads to unproductively competitive behavior from users, and to over-reliance on it from staff
    • Pictogram tick.png Done: Delete the Wiki Cap candidates list, and stop using the Wiki Cap scoring script entirely
  • While distribution on a weekly basis seemed like a good idea to regulate the number of total Wiki Caps in existence, it had the side-effect of the community having the false expectation for it to happen without fail every week, and proved to be too slow at times, causing frustration
    • Pictogram tick.png Done: Dispel the notion that drops will happen every week; we did that by not giving anything on June 26th
    • The frequency to give it may be irregular now. However, getting everyone together in order to decide on distribution requires a generally-agreed-upon moment when people are there, which may vary over time in order to keep it irregular
    • Volume/rarity concerns should be disregarded; even if all editors with over 500 edits or so got a Wiki Cap, it would still be considered a rare item
  • The English and Russian parts of the Wiki being complete, there has been an issue of people creating work for themselves in order to get more edits
    • Pictogram tick.png Done The deletion of the list should help this, as edit count matters less now, and is less visible
  • The combination of these things turned the Wiki Cap into a standalone reason to edit, rather than a reward for doing so
    • This needs to be more emphasized into the Wiki Cap guidelines
    • Rewarding users based on other things than editing (e.g. outstanding community contribution, à la Shugo (item icons), Michael (highlander team), or Benjamoose (promo material, graphics, general awesomeness))
    • This should make the "bias towards IRC members" more widely accepted, since IRC is a great way to get involved in more community-related matters other than pure editing. However, it should never be completely mandatory to use it
  • The Wiki Cap guidelines need to be rewritten
    • This can only be done when all of the above is settled


The method most people were leaning towards as of the last discussion was to do it on a nominate-and-approve basis:

  • Staff members (or maybe regular contributions?) can nominate people and explain the reasons behind the nomination
  • The rest of the staff reviews the nomination and approves, or declines, explaining their decision in case of a "no".

Multiple questions arise:

  • When and where does this discussion happen?
  • Can regular contributors see it?
    • If yes, can they also nominate others?
  • Does an approval require unanimity? Does it require a threshold of "yes"'s? Does a nomination expire if nobody says anything?

Last point: Robin said, in the email in which he talked about wiki cap distribution, that we may run any changes past by him. This is such a change, so his opinion should be taken into account before making any decision final. — Wind 11:43, 3 July 2011 (PDT)


Edit as of July 6th: Reformatted to make it easier to answer. Each question has its own section.

Distribution process

Concensus or majority decides recipient?

Should recipients decided by a concensus or majority vote by the discussion attendees?

Pictogram comment.png Majority I'm going with majority here... I don't think any single attendee should be able to stop somebody receiving a cap if the rest of the attendees think that person deserves it. -User RJackson Signature Colon DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.png 16:11, 17 July 2011 (PDT)
Pictogram comment.png Majority For exactly RJ's reason. User Moussekateer signature sprite.pngMoussekateer·talk 16:23, 17 July 2011 (PDT)

IRC logs be visible?

Should the IRC logs of the discussion be public?

Pictogram tick.png Yes The ability for the community to review what we're saying, I think, will add a bit of pressure to make well informed decisions. -User RJackson Signature Colon DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.png 16:11, 17 July 2011 (PDT)
Pictogram tick.png Yes Transparency is important. Voting behind closed doors with no non-staff scrutiny leaves the process open to accusation of bias and distrust in the system. User Moussekateer signature sprite.pngMoussekateer·talk 16:23, 17 July 2011 (PDT)

Invite trusted editors to the discussion?

Should trusted editors be able to partake in the discussion?

Pictogram tick.png Yes I think the more people partaking in the discussion would reduce the effects of any personal bias'/"friends of the admins". -User RJackson Signature Colon DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD.png 16:11, 17 July 2011 (PDT)
Pictogram comment.png Dunno How would we choose these 'trusted editors'? Are they just the green texted people? The fact that we call them 'trusted editors' might still imply a bias. User Moussekateer signature sprite.pngMoussekateer·talk 16:23, 17 July 2011 (PDT)

Closed discussions

Discussions that are considered to have been completed will be moved here.