Timothy, go ahead! Make all the recognition badges you want! And I only did a quick job of assigning badges to people, so if you notice that somebody is deserving then go ahead an give them a badge ;D

Otherwise, this is an excellent use of the profile pages! Thanks James, especially for finding a use for them.
Timothy Foster — My Site ~ My Blog

But first, allow me to thank Timothy Foster for creating the member framework. The main purpose for him doing that was so that we could automatically list the members of the community in the order that they joined. I warned him not to do the process, as it may be done in vain for when Wikidot implement an automatic feature as such (which quite recently, they have, by the way). However, he was very forward thinking and created individual "profile pages" for each member (which achieves the original purpose).

In doing this very very long and tiring process, Timothy has single handedly paved the framework for me to create a recognition system! Thankyou Timothy.

I would suggest that the community also make an effort to thank him.

Using Timothy's member framework, I created the badge page, which is included by the _template page. On each member page, if the appropriate tag is added, a badge will automatically appear. I haven't created many badges, namely:

• _regular
• _regular-forum
• _create-member
• _moderator
• _administrator
• _master-administrator

See Timothy's profile to see most of these in action.

Now, I'm not very creative, so I couldn't think of any other badges to provide recognition to worthy members. I ask the community to provide suggestions — maybe even nominations!

You will also notice that I haven't given nice badge-pictures to any of the badges. Perhaps somebody would like to volunteer for that honour?

If you think somebody in the community deserves recognition, and you want to nominate them anonymously, then by all means feel free to contact one of the moderators or administrators in a private message.

Cheers guys, and good luck!

~kRaZiNeSs

You see, there is something difficult about having a vote each month - it may take a good half a month for a decent amount of people to vote, and distinct results. And what if two people contribute significantly in the same time space of a month? Would it be fair to give one person the recognition and not the other? And what if the other doesn't do anything the next month, or forever? Then that person would have missed out on a well deserved recognition.

I propose a sort of criteria system. For example, if somebody meets a criteria, then BOOM! They get the prize. If two people meet the criteria, then BOOM! They both get the prize. (Funny, I don't recall using the phrase "boom" at any stage of my life before…)

Now we need to set criteria. Perhaps we could devise something like a point system:

• 1 point for a minor edit;
• 5 points for an addition;
• 10 points for a big addition;
• 15 points for making a significant improvement (whether it be to the wiki, or fixing an article);
• 20 points for turning an ordinary article into a Featured Article.

Then when somebody gets to a certain benchmark, then we give recognition. For example, 100 points.

Maybe we could make a table on a new page called the "Recognition Table", where there would be a row for each user, and columns for each kind of edit and a total column. This page should only be editable by moderators and admins, and therefore only viewable to members. Each time somebody reaches the benchmark, we put them on a sort of "Recognition Page" or "Milestone Page", kind of like the "Hall Of Fame" for the challenges, including the user, and their stats at that moment, and the moment they reached the benchmark.

However, it is a rather large job to moderate this. Moderators and/or Admins would need to look at the "Recent Changes" page, and manually add points to the table for each thing. They would also need to judge what kind of edit a thing is, and how many edits something is (for example, multiple minor edits on the same page should be considered a "big edit" rather than many small ones).

In this sense, there would be no need for voting and would also eliminate any voting bias. Also, admins could win the prize as well, but perhaps some rules, such as, moderators can't tally their own edits, other moderators would need to do that for them.

What do you guys think?

Cheers ~ James Kanjo

Maybe you get to be an admin for the month, or you get one of your programs featured on the homepage?

I'm not sure about that. You see, I think we should only display programs on the front page if they offer a significant educational value to the wiki. By educational, I mean, interesting technique that could be learnt and used.

As with admin for the month, I personally wouldn't want to trivialise being an admin. Moderator, maybe…but not admin.

Bragging rights is a pretty good prize! Not on the wiki, but to friends who haven't heard of the wiki…"I won frequent additions of the month on TI-Basic Developer on Wikidot.com!"

But that's just what I think.

Oh, I just had an idea - see below

The way I envision it working is that people could nominate somebody, and we would then have a group vote. The person who gets the most votes gets the award. To my knowledge, no other TI sites are currently doing this, so I think we should try it out. Who knows, it might give people an incentive to contribute more to the site :D