Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-24108228-20140815194949

At the Survival 303 Wiki, we are currently going through a stage of wiki inactivity, as the large majority of the active editors now only participate in the forums, and our wiki pages are becoming rather neglected. Highlighted by the (potentially permanent) departure of our most active contributor, who was the only person who really edited the wiki pages frequently; along with a large scandal involving poll manipulation, it has been brought to our attention that we need to encourage our community to edit more pages, and encourage new contributors (of which we have no shortage of) to stay.

The more obvious way of rewarding activity is to use the achievement system, however a lot of the new contributors are underage, and we have discovered through experience that they would not hesitate to create spam pages, blogs, and threads (usually consisting of "I wanted the badge.") to get achievements. Our small admin base cannot keep up with all the spam and clutter, and certainly doesn't want to spend all their time removing the pages, and therefore it was deemed "Not an option."

I have tried to create a template which will keep track of various namespace edits, multiply them according to their usefulness, and give each person a "score" they can put on their user page and show off for self esteem and possibly rewards in the form of name colour changes and such, although I'm getting an issue with expressions including editcounts, as I get the following message: Which has put a spanner in the works. Until I find a patch for that I cannot do anything like it, and therefore that idea doesn't work either.

Have any of you experienced this kind of problem, and could you offer advise for my situation? 