I’ve seen this topic raised before.
How could editting on MB become more fun?
(And yes opt-in would be a necessity. I have no wish to disturb those who find the current pay-offs to be unsurpassable.)
A monthly ranking of number of edits could be good for the high flyers.
Monthly rank boards for number of edits by category (artist, release, work, series, etc)
Beyond that I’m at a loss.
What can/have others come up with?
I know there’s some stuff related to gamification in BookBrainz, so maybe @LordSputnik or @LeftmostCat have something to suggest here.
I have a problem with gamification based on sheer numbers - we’ve seen before some people who’d just mass vote Yes on things without checking carefully enough just to get a big number in the votes ranking, and we shouldn’t encourage that. But I’m not opposed at all to carefully thought-out gamification 
Yes.
I think focussing on quantity could easily have that effect.
As well as discouraging newer slower editors.
I’m surprised at the difficulty of envisioning a “device” that makes for a game.
There are a number of things that could work:
I like the approach from BookBrainz to focus on making achievements/badges (or “stickers” as my gf calls them 
) rather than making ranked lists (like we already sort of has). Some may still “game” the system to gain a couple of badges, but I don’t think these would matter much in the long term.
And speaking of BookBrainz, you might want to check out @quora’s GSoC 2016 application for this:
(And maybe the ping will cause @quora to stop by and give some of his thoughts as well. 
)
A Wild Quora Appears!
I worked on the BookBrainz Achievement system and would be happy to do something similar for other projects if there was interest in it. I haven’t been around to gather feedback on the BookBrainz one sadly (Uni is a time vacuum 
), but if there was any feedback from that I’d be happy to implement it when I get my time back and potentially port it over to other projects.
The metric I’d be most interested in tracking would be “thanks” if there were a “thank you / good work!” button.
I definitely like the achievement system, but I also think we need some actual ‘community’ to be cultivated if we really want to have those rewards feel like they’re worth something.
This is some ideas from a couple of years ago but some I think would be a pretty cool way to make someone feel involved in something bigger.
Explaining things from the screenshot:
Some kind of mentor system/ follow a new editor. Not so that we can vote ‘no’ on bad edits, but so that those users feel like they’re getting involved in a community with real people, and yes, perhaps they can pick up some tips while they’re at it.
Editor of the moment/ top editors etc (I actually agree that top editors/voters might lead to more problems than it’s worth, but there’s other achievements we can highlight), would be a great way to make people feel valued. There are plenty of people who contribute in amazing ways - be it editing, voting, coding etc - who never really get acknowledged, and I don’t really see a downside.
Busiest edit/ forum post/s - this would be a great way of getting eyes onto important edits and discussions, but also to direct people ‘where the action is’, if they’re interested. Sometimes MB editing can be pretty isolating (esp. if you’re editing niche music) so this would be very cool.
Community Editing Probably the main one, have a focus each week/month where we/someone picks an artist or a label, or something else, that we can all fix together. A progress bar isn’t necessary but would be pretty great. That way if someone has an hour to kill they can join in on something. Also many hands make light work so it might be very rewarding to see something speeding along for a change (instead of spending days/weeks/months trying to do something on your own)
Note that all of this can be tied in with more traditional ‘gamification’/achievements as well, so I’m not proposing an ‘either/or’.
Anyway I’ve shared these suggestions before but because it’s buried on the old forums here they are again
We used to have this years ago, but it kinda went away. But of course that was mostly organised through mailing lists and the like - if it was on the main site too, it might be easier to get people in
it was CotM (cleanup of the month (originally collaboration of the Month)) which is something I’d love to bring back again.
There are two sites I use that have gamification, StackOverflow and Wikitree (ancestry research). The idea of gamification didn’t really interest me and still doesn’t really affect my use of StackOverflow, However I do find myself checking where I rank in Wikitree every time I use it and would like tomove up the rankings - so I would say it is useful even appealing to more cynical amongst us.
But personally I would prioritise addition of new releases rather than edits of existing and voting since there are so many songs identified by acoustid that can not be linked to MusicBrainz since they don’t exist in the MusicBrainz database.
