Revision 6105567 of "User:Alerante/Point system" on enwiki

:''This is just a proposition, not policy. See the [[User talk:Alerante/Point_system|talk page]] for all discussion.''

:''Any comments not part of the original page should be signed with four tildes.''

After taking the [[Wikipedia:Wikipediholic|Wikipediholic]] test for the fourth time, I suddenly, for an inexplicable reason, had a brain spark. Why not use a point system to determine who can do what? Perhaps this was related to my browsing of [[GameFAQs]], which also uses such a system for its permissions.

Each contributor is given a number of points, essentially an indicator of the privileges a certain user had. People aim to gain these points by making contributions that others deem useful, thereby increasing the chance that someone will vote in a positive manner for them.

==Giving points==

A user can grant a certain percentage (-100 to 100) of an allotted fraction of points to someone else. The donor does not lose points, but rather gives a "prop" to the other's rating.

Let's say [[User:ExampleUser|ExampleUser]] has 476 points. Assuming that he can give 5% of his points to, say [[User:JohnDoe|JohnDoe]], who has 99, ExampleUser can decide to increase or decrease JohnDoe's rating by 23.8 points. If he gives JohnDoe a '''rating''' of 50%, JohnDoe will now have 115.9 points, and ExampleUser retains his 476.

A user cannot give more than one rating at a time, but he or she can change it. If JohnDoe makes a major change to, say, [[Cheese]], that ExampleUser likes, the latter can change his rating of JohnDoe to 100%, pushing his point level up to 122.8 points.

In addition, these ratings are affected by the granting contributor's points. For example, if ExampleUser gains somebody's favor and now has 500 points, JohnDoe's 100% rating is not a 23.8 but a 25, so he has 124 points.

Anonymous users cannot have points, as [[IP address]]es are not guaranteed to only be one person. They will always edit at the base level of zero points.

==Privilege levels==

The number of points that a user has determines how many privileges he or she has. A sample table follows, which is by no means final, rather just a couple of numbers I threw together before Civics and Economics the other day:

{|
|-
!Points
!Permissions given
|-
| -100
|Banned or blocked
|-
|''0''
|''Base level for anonymous users''<br />Editing with a required summary
|-
|''15''
|''Base level for registered users''<br />Ability to mark edits as minor<br />Summaries not required
|-
|30
|Creation of new main namespace pages
|-
|50
|Ability to move pages
|-
|100
|Availability of a rollback link for on-the-spot reversion
|-
|150
|Ability to delete images
|-
|200
|Ability to delete and undelete pages
|-
|300
|Ability to protect and unprotect pages, and edit protected pages
|-
|350
|Ability to run [[SQL]] queries
|}

And so on. I'll edit this as ideas pop up.

==Reasoning==

There are some advantages behind this system:

*Votes no longer have to be held on [[Wikipedia:Requests for adminship|Requests for adminship]], [[Wikipedia:Requests for de-adminship|Requests for de-adminship]], and the blocking of certain users (note that [[Wikipedia:Requests for comment|Requests for comment]] is not included in this list), as they are already made by the community's ratings.
*Bureaucrats are not needed because sysops will be made by the consensus of contributors.
*More respected users are naturally given more weight, ensuring that one cannot simply create a bunch of [[sock puppet]]s to inflate their rating unfairly.

==Possible objections==

*Doesn't this create a [[caste system]] of sorts?

:Yes, but there is already some vestige of that in the titles of sysop, bureaucrat, etc. In my opinion, one's rating should be hidden from other users and only visible to themselves.

*Doesn't this distract the attention from editors away from contributing to articles, turning essentially all of them into [[bureaucrats]]?

*Doesn't this turn Wikipedia into a giant flamewar where people will fight over points and punish people with different opinions by penalising them?

==Miscellanea==

I've held off on allowing [[Wikipedia:Developer|Developer]] privileges to be granted by this. The people who run the server should be able to protect its integrity.

<small>[ [[User:Alerante|alerante]] | [[User_talk:Alerante|&#x201c;&#x201d;]] 23:11, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC) ]</small>