Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia Badges/projectplan

Rationale

• Targeted. Badges can be used to increase overall participation and the quality of participation.
• Actionable. As deliverables, this project should have a trial badge system(s) with badges, a documented set of best practices and how-to’s, and any other material and artifacts necessary to make badge systems replicable on different Wikimedia projects.
• Impactful. The intent is to allow badge systems to be versatile and applicable to different projects throughout the Wikimedia ecosystem. The proposal is to only affect some projects while the badge system designs are being evaluated.
• Sustainable. Part of designing a successful badge system would be to make it possible for community members to create their own badges, evaluate achievement and assign badges to recipients.
• Scalable. A documented set of best practices will help badges be easier to implement in different contexts.
• Measurable. A successful badge system would be used by the intended participants and would increase contribution. It would also be straightforward to implement by a project community.

Activities

• Review other Wikimedia projects with award systems and pull-out best practices and potential weaknesses
• Create a process for community members to submit relevant badge ideas
• Engage project organizers and project participants in coming up with badge design and award flow ideas
• Curate/select a good badge collection to represent acknowledgements for a diverse amount of tasks, reward accomplishments of varying difficulty, and be perceived as meaningful. Badges should also be closely tied with their criteria, titles and descriptions, and should be presented in ways that allow for easy discovery of these meta-data elements.
• Create mechanisms for awarding and presenting badges to participants.
• Create a testing framework for the new design.
• Create a space to document project progress and findings

Pilot deliverables

• A curated set of barnstars that are appropriate for the target project(s)
• An augmented collection of additional badges that specifically acknowledge the work done through these projects, with an emphasis on everyday achievements
• Mechanisms to make the barnstars/badges accessible to project participants.
• A system for linking to evidence for the achievement
• Report documenting best practices and community responses as to if, how and when badges are effective as tools for encouraging acknowledgement and editor retention

Research and evaluation

Collect

• Host activity before badge pilot vs. host activity after badge pilot
• Guest activity before badge pilot vs. guest activity after badge pilot
• Badge award activity
• Badge sharing activity/How many badges end up in the Open Badge Backpack

Also monitor

• Poorly administered badges. Ie. People not receiving badges they deserve due to technical or social errors
• Badges that motivate people to do something that is harmful for the project or take away focus from constructive editing and collaboration
• Badges that are ignored or completely not used
• Badge recipients trying to collect badges without doing the necessary work
• Badge recipients receiving badges for work not done or achievements not achieved.
• Increase in the gender editing gap (potentially due to increased competition or misplaced acknowledgement)
• Decrease in editing or overall participation