User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Blogs are now available on the Unified Community Platform/@comment-961279-20200815152840

There's three things that would really help for Achievements.

The first is the ability to select which groups of Achievements to be active. For example, turning off the badges related to adding categories. Category spamming and abuse becomes magnified if people can earn a badge for adding a category. Category abuse is using categories as an excuse not to anything on the main part of the page, facilitated by it being easier to click on "Add category" than to the time to write sentences.

By being able to choose which kinds of Achievements are active, wikis can focus on what's needed to strengthen it. Right now, it's everything or nothing.

The second would be an opt out flag for individual users. People who put in a lot of work to adopt a wiki or are doing maintenance can easily climb the leaderboard, making it difficult for others to reach the top spots. It gets harder the longer the wiki has Achievements active. On Moviepedia's leaderboard, the top three users have 22,240 points, 18,010 and then 9,490. Everyone else has 6K or less. A new person could look at that and say it's not worth it to try.

If you didn't want to earn badges or didn't care about them because you enjoy working on a wiki more than getting a reward, you could choose to not have your edits count in the leaderboard. Right now, using a bot account is the only way to be exempt from earning a badge. A switch in user preferences would let individuals decide if they want to let others have a chance.

Just thought of a third item for Achievements: the ability to reset the leaderboard. Initially, maybe this could be limited to Fandom staff for when a wiki is adopted if it was laying dormant until someone came along and decided they wanted to bring it back to life. Starting back at zero would give the new visitors to a reborn wiki a chance to continue its rebirth instead of competing against people who may have left years ago.

If the reset function became available to administrators, it could be used as a competition in other ways, such as an announcement in October that badges would reset on January 1st to see who could become the top editor in the upcoming year.

Even better would be an archive function, where all badges earned prior to a reset are archived with a timestamp that says, "Badges earned from January 1, 2018 to September 23, 2019". Like how the User Talk page is archived when the Message Wall is enabled on a wiki.