I've had an idea about creating a House points system for some time now. We'd split editors into four task forces and then award points based on good work around the project. It would be about motivating article improvement, not competition, so there be no punitive deduction of points. The House that accumulated the most points would be awarded the House Cup, and we'd start a new round of the game every couple of months.
Also, it would be opt-in, so no one who sticks a Hufflepuff userbox on their user page would feel compelled to help Hufflepuff "win" — thus taking on more work than they feel they can reasonably handle. I also realize that many users feel they fit equally in more than one House, so, in order to accomodate such people, we could allow the points someone receives to be evenly split between two Houses.
We could also have have Prefects and a Head Student. These could be awards given to individual users, with the Prefect being the user from each House who did the most outstanding work, and the Head Student being the best overall. Or perhaps the Head Student and Prefects could be more like team leaders: people who help to organize and encourage collaboration.
What does everyone think of this idea? ★ Starstuff (Owl me!) 01:06, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
- I think that that idea would be really cool. I've seen other wikis use a system to reward users for achievements. There could be a userbox for each house which user can put on their user pages to show off the amount of points their favorite house has.--Matoro183 (Talk) 01:12, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
- We could have a special table on the Community Portal for keeping track of the point totals. It would be a bit like the hourglasses in the Entrance Hall at Hogwarts. ★ Starstuff (Owl me!) 01:23, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
- We could use the House points system as a way to motivate people to get involved with WikiProjects, but it could also be used to recognize independent work, like uploading quality pictures, organizing categories, and creating new articles. In the books, points are awarded on more of an individual, case-by-case basis, but why not have it both ways? :)
- We'd also need to choose which users have the authority to award points. I'd say admins, who could be considered kind of like professors, and also the Prefects. The "professors" (i.e., admins) would oversee the Prefects and ensure they awarded points fairly.
- Each House could hold an election to decide who they want their Prefects to be. The canon model of one male, one female Prefect per House might be difficult to execute on a wiki, given the fact that wikis tend to have more male users than female users. But we could remove the gender requirement and simply appoint two Prefects for each House. ★ Starstuff (Owl me!) 02:06, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
- Very nice thinking. This system would definately be great. The only problem that I can see is that we might not have enough users to have one professor and two prefects per house. But still, awesome idea! -- Freakatone Talk 02:11, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
- We could probably get away with only one Prefect per House. We could also ask users who are divided between more than one House to "take a side" for the sake of the game. This means that the point-splitting idea for House-ambivalent users would have to be abandoned.
- I wasn't suggesting that we have Heads of House in addition to Prefects: only that admins, as the people who enforce the rules on this site, are sort of like professors, and that, in addition to awarding points themselves, they could monitor the Prefects and ensure that they don't cheat or award points in a biased manner. But this idea assumes that a user who's an admin couldn't also be elected as a Prefect, and, given our personnel shortage, probably isn't feasible.
- All very good points. Maybe those users given "prefect" badges could pick a house and be a prefect for that house? If any prefect is being biased, we could hold an "impeachment" of some sort. This gets rid of the need for any heads of houses and such. On This Day should definately be the first project. -- Freakatone Talk 02:48, 6 November 2008 (UTC)