User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Announcing Achievements - Edit your way to the top/@comment-961279-20100828183317

For wikis that are still contemplating adding the Achievement badges, it would help if there was some sort of help page or how-to guide that they could look at to see what's involved with setting it up. There is a Help:Achievements page, but that's more of a description of Achivements rather than instructions on how to use them.

That help page mentions going to Special:AchievementsCustomize, but on the James Cameron's Avatar Wiki, it reports back "No such special page", so I can't look at what the settings are. I know I don't have sufficient rights on that page to edit it, but if you go to any of the MediaWiki: pages, you can at least look at the contents even if you're not an admin.

I can do a search for "MediaWiki:Achievements" and see the 40 Achievement badge names, but since I haven't seen the movie yet, I don't know how their customized names relate to the function that each badge is about.

There is a real need for information so that wikis can plan how to add this feature. Right now, all that seems to be available is: activate it, then figure out how to customize it afterwards.

And as I mentioned two weeks ago, there is also a need for advice and support on how to deal with the poor edits that will be made by people who are simply trying to earn badges rather than make quality edits that improve the wiki. Without that, I could see wikis turning off the Achievements because they're tired of dealing with spam/fluff and they have no guidance on how to handle it. I suppose you could hand out short blocks for the people that abuse it, but how long do you do that before you drive away new editors?

I set up a blog so I can get some ideas on that second part. Hopefully, someone will come up with a FAQ or a how-to guide on how to set up the badges so that planning to activate them can take place.