StrategyWiki:Milk project

This project is to flesh out the requirements for giving rewards to special users who contribute to a specific goal in a set time period.

Qualifications
To qualify for a special reward, you must:
 * 1) Be a registered member of StrategyWiki
 * 2) Not be an administrator or judge of the Milk project.
 * I think this depends on who is allowed to vote. If milk project members are allowed to vote, then they should be excluded, otherwise they're eligible as well. -- Prod (Talk) 00:47, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I was using the same definition of "member" in the Judges section, thus I believe the judging portion should be updated to give more information. --Sigma 7 01:55, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps "Milk project member" and "Judge" should be interchangeable. I.e. someone who just helps is not a milk project member, but someone who is authorized to authenticate and critique the Milk Project challenges (i.e. vote) is.
 * 1) Not be a sponsor (publisher, investor, members of the development team, intellectual property owner(s), etc.) of a game that has a Milk Project challenge. However, you may still participate in challenges that apply to other games.

Cookies

 * Specific parts of a guide or walkthrough.
 * Full walkthrough.
 * Fulfilling a request.

Milk

 * Cash.
 * Games.
 * Merchandise.
 * Buy God of War III for najzere T and he'll write a walkthrough for it. With pictures.

Judging

 * Closed panel of Admins
 * Milk project members (not allowed to participate)

Unofficial contests
From time to time, there may be informal or third-party contests to contribute. These contests are usually for fame, and may have specific rules for creating guides.
 * User:Melon247/Competition!

Ad revenue sharing
This would require knowing how many click thrus (or whatever our revenue is based on) a page is getting. Some ad affiliates give this information out to members as a matter of course, but I don't know how ours works. It's something that is likely tracked and if we don't know already, it might just take asking for this info.
 * Basic idea: Give a percentage of ad revenue generated by a specific page to that page's contributors.

A tougher hurdle would be figuring out how the share would be divvied up among the contributor list. The number of bytes changed as MediaWiki tracks or how many edits a user makes don't really indicate anything about quality. Maybe some kind of edit rating system could be used by admins while they're patrolling? Like rate this edit from 1–5 stars or something. Or mark an edit as being of a particular type, as content additions are probably worth more than say tweaking or cleanup? I dunno.

The benefit would be that high traffic pages would be inherently incentivized, and at the same time we wouldn't have to limit giving back to users based on picking guides ourselves. Meaning that someone who wants to make a guide for an unpopular game wouldn't feel excluded from the system like they would if we had a list of which games could earn a reward and theirs wasn't on it. Another benefit is a tagline like "get paid to write walkthroughs" would be pretty tasty on any advertising we do.

The drawback is that it would have to be set up and would need some custom wiki coding as well as interfacing with the ad system if this was expected to be automated.

— najzere T 21:01, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Things that would make this work better
 * Tracking how much money (or points or whatever the reward is) the user has accumulated and incorporating it into some sort of level system. This would be like a StrategyWiki ranking system so people could brag about how popular their guides are.
 * A comprehensive rating system for page traffic that is accessible to users so they can know a likely page to generate rewards. This would be like a beefed up version of the "Most Wanted" section of the front page. In addition to a page with a list of the top however many pages by traffic, a traffic rank on each individual page would be good too (like right below the toolbox or something).
 * All our editors are equals, no user should be ranked higher than others. There used to be a pageview counter at the bottom of pages, which you can see if you use monobook.  There are some of those other things mentioned through various special pages I believe. -- Prod (Talk) 20:27, 22 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Ranking is purely a mechanic to increase the success of the system – it doesn't need to have any actual impact outside of benchmarking, pride of accomplishment and recognition for outstanding editors. Do you think a revenue-sharing program is possible? I see some major advantages in it, but I don't know how actionable it is. I guess a more pertinent point is whether, if we have all the information necessary, we could count on a commitment from someone in a position to implement it. — najzere T 21:14, 22 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Revenue sharing works best if authors have exclusive control over their postings (as in the other site.) When it comes to this wiki, it would require substantial overhead to determine how to allocate funds; the only good way is to base it on activity, and most methods I can think of are prone to abuse in one way or another. There's nothing wrong with sponsoring guide creation as a form of public bounty or advertisement project, which may work best. --Sigma 7 19:23, 24 January 2010 (UTC)
 * Bounties will have the same problem, unless you let one editor "own" what he's working on. I think Skizzerz made an extension that would give article creators certain control over their pages to enforce that kind of ownership. I don't know if that's a road we want to go down, however. I have an idea for discerning how to split up any money (for revenue sharing or bounties), based on rating the contributions made to the page. — najzere T 20:47, 24 January 2010 (UTC)