Topic on Adventures in Odyssey Wiki:Town Hall2

I have an idea. I want to make something called "Awards". Basically, if a user makes an achievement, like 100 edits, someone will send them an award. If this is allowed,I would create a sub-page with the awards, and post them on people's talk pages when they achieve something. It would be a fun way to encourage users to keep going and achieve an award.

Not to be the old grump here but I would not be in favor of this kind of thing.
First of all adding "Awards" or achievements can drastically change a site. Once gamification has been added there is no going back. Sebastian Deterding says that gamification can encourage unintended behaviors. It is that unintended behavior that I am leery of. I was a mod on a large stackexchange site for ~5 years, I understand the lure of getting a badge, and have seen what users will do to get them.

Gamification is used as a way to increase user participation (among other things). We have a well established wiki with a ever changing active body of contributors. The wiki is alive and well. The wiki does not need to add a system to try to get users to do more, we are doing quite well now.

Aside from the (even if it is unlikely) side effects, personally I just don't care for having some badge added to my user page. I'm probably the odd one out on that point.
The wiki does not have any way to do this kind of thing (like stack exchange does for example) so we'd be relying on users to manually award the badges. That kind of system is begging for trouble. As an example, before I automated the avary awards for the actors we had the wrong count on 3 out of 6 (if my memory serves me) of the actresses' pages. This is a huge issue. If the wiki decided that we wanted some sort of system like this the only way I'd be in favor of it would be to have an automatic system. Think a leader board for edits, or a badges page showing what users have earned what.

I'm sure you were envisioning just a simple little thing to add a bit of fun, but things are rarely ever that simple. If this system caught on, you really could, and I dare say you would change actions of the users on this wiki.

You’re not alone, I agree. Gamification would very likely lead to unwanted behaviour.

I understand. Thank you for your reply and input!

Wasn't there a page that existed quite a while back on the Wiki that listed which users had the most edits? If my memory serves correctly, the page was removed because users were making meaningless edits in order to get to the top. Something similar would likely happen with the addition of an "awards" system. However, I could see a scenario in which the current userbox system could be updated to include items similar to the awards which you referred to (in fact, such userboxes could already exist, and I'm simply unaware of them). That's my opinion, at least. Take it for what it's worth.