The Banality of the 'Chair
From the start, let me say that I am happy to be a member of Armchairgm and as a member of the Administration. I have, both, enjoyed my time here and have been disgruntled enough to go on a long hiatus.
Yes, sure, there are user ideas on this site that totally frustrate the hell out of me. There are also users that inspire me to do a better job to make this site a better place for future users.
Despite the overall betterment that the last update has created for the site, there are things that are just not right. This may be due to many factors. It may be a change in policy, or a lack of insight on the part of the designers.
Let me give a specific example. A user can jump on the Ratings Page and go to town on accumulating points for really doing nothing to help better the site. Yet the user that sits down and creates an improvement to the encyclopedia (that betters the site) receives little in return. In terms of time, the ratings can be done fairly quickly with a huge positive to the individual user. With the encyclopedic user, an individual page may take upwards of a half hour (or more) to complete with very little gain in point totals.
If you look at the “Site Scout” at any time, you will see that there are far more votes than anything else. Yeah, this includes votes for individual articles as well, but the amount of comments + edits is still less than half of votes. (At this time, 1512 Pacific, there are 719 votes, 398 edits, and 226 comments.)
The point system is a fun idea to judge how you are doing versus the other users. But, where is the incentive to make the site better? There are users on here that are here to troll (which greatly improve score), cast votes (see above), those that actually write articles (modest scoring), and those that work behind the scene (also see above). Most users do a combination of these actions for a total score.
So, my point of this post is to ask if you think that the point scoring is accurate to the overall betterment of the site. What can be done to get people to further enhance the site (ie make edits, add to encyclopedia)?
