Announcing Achievements - Edit your way to the top

Sarah Manley August 3, 2010

We're excited to announce a great new addition to the Wikia feature set -- Achievements! Achievements can help you build a bit of friendly editing competition on your wiki, encourage your readers to become editors and recognize contributions.

A couple of the badges you can earn!
Achievement badges2.pngYou can customize badges to fit your wiki
The Great Warrior Badge
God of War Wiki recently earned badges
Top 5 point holders on the Twilight Wiki leaderboard

With this dynamic new feature you can automatically earn "Badges" for making edits, adding pictures, writing blog posts and contributing to your wiki in other ways. Each badge that you earn gives you achievement points and contributors with the most points score a spot on the wiki's leaderboard.

You'll have a basic set of badges to get started or you can customize the names and images of each badge to fit your wiki's topic. The James Cameron's Avatar Wiki has done an awesome job with this, customizing each badge to fit the world of Pandora. For example, if you make 100 edits, you get the Nawm Tsamsiyu (Great Warrior) badge -- which is totally fierce and awesome looking!

If you're interested in adding Achievements to your wiki, have your admins send a request to Special:Contact. See you on the leaderboard!

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Some Wikis I use, Ben 10 Fan Fiction and Phineas and Ferb Fanon, have the feature. I love it!
---****--- Roads

January 7, 2011 by Roads
I have a question, would it be ok to warn, and if they continue, block users for making unneeded edits, simply to earn badges?

December 26, 2010 by BobNewbie
history

That makes sense.
---****--- Roads

January 7, 2011 by Roads

I don't like them because sometimes users want them so much, they create stupid/unneeded pages and make a bunch of categories. But that's for fact-based wikis. For fun wikis, it's great.

December 26, 2010 by Nightfern
How can I get achievments on my wiki?

November 30, 2010 by GameGear360
I don't know if anybody else has this problem, or if anybody can help me with it, but I'll post it here. On the leader board, it shows the top 20 people, their points, and most recently earned badge. The problem is the most recently earned badge is stuck on the first badge they ever earned. The badges are displayed normally and up to date on their user pages, just not the leader board. Here's a link to my wiki: http://southpark.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Leaderboard Can anybody help me?

November 19, 2010 by Neocarleen

And now it's completely disappeared...

November 20, 2010 by Neocarleen

hey, im in charge of The matrix Wikiacould you add some achievement points to that the wikia please? =)
here is address
www.matrix.wikia.com

September 9, 2010 by Sclera1

Hi, glad to see you're interested in achievements. Please send your request to Special:Contact from your wiki and we'll be happy to take a look. =)

September 9, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
history

For wikis that are still contemplating adding the Achievement badges, it would help if there was some sort of help page or how-to guide that they could look at to see what's involved with setting it up. There is a Help:Achievements page, but that's more of a description of Achivements rather than instructions on how to use them.
That help page mentions going to Special:AchievementsCustomize, but on the James Cameron's Avatar Wiki, it reports back "No such special page", so I can't look at what the settings are. I know I don't have sufficient rights on that page to edit it, but if you go to any of the MediaWiki: pages, you can at least look at the contents even if you're not an admin.
I can do a search for "MediaWiki:Achievements" and see the 40 Achievement badge names, but since I haven't seen the movie yet, I don't know how their customized names relate to the function that each badge is about.

There is a real need for information so that wikis can plan how to add this feature. Right now, all that seems to be available is: activate it, then figure out how to customize it afterwards.
And as I mentioned two weeks ago, there is also a need for advice and support on how to deal with the poor edits that will be made by people who are simply trying to earn badges rather than make quality edits that improve the wiki. Without that, I could see wikis turning off the Achievements because they're tired of dealing with spam/fluff and they have no guidance on how to handle it. I suppose you could hand out short blocks for the people that abuse it, but how long do you do that before you drive away new editors?
I set up a blog so I can get some ideas on that second part. Hopefully, someone will come up with a FAQ or a how-to guide on how to set up the badges so that planning to activate them can take place.

August 28, 2010 by RRabbit42
Very cool!

August 28, 2010 by Kingdonfin
I love the fact that there is a leaderboard for people with achievements.

August 27, 2010 by Malenovolence
I love these i am pretty sure that they are on right now i love them!

August 25, 2010 by Eric Redmonger
I like this! That makes Lyricwiki even better.

August 23, 2010 by Prybar
coolz.i wanna add acheivements to my wiki.my wiki name..thing is chrono12.wikia.com.i don't have a E-mail.so mines like fake. so can you just add it to my wiki?im a newb to this....

August 22, 2010 by Chrono X
Plus There is a blaming girl named Seaocean

August 22, 2010 by Seawater
We've had problems with words in our wikia by the mean words and editing otherwise everything else is wonderful.

August 22, 2010 by Seawater
We've had a lot of problems on our wiki with users adding random categories to win awards. It disrupts the organization of the wiki. The achievement awards encourage unconstructive editing, and don't do anything to promote wiki growth; and it emphisizes quantity, rather than quality of edits.

August 21, 2010 by Eric the Grape
Well, I think the editing someone else's talk page and the blog comments badges just influence spam. Everything else is OK.

August 16, 2010 by Solar Dragon
Yeay, very nice. But I've seen some wikis or wikians that dislike the badges, the functionality. They say: "This could cause war between users, or unnecessary editions to obtain a badge". That's true. Many of the ways to earn a badge, are very easy.
I reverted a revision, surprise, incredibly I got 60 points (or more). I know that reasons of this new achievement are goods, but some wikians (including me) believe are incorrect, or, you can improve it.

August 15, 2010 by Ashertz
I have added a message to the welcome message that states anyone who spams in an attempt to get badges will get an instant block. Not that anyone reads the wecloem message anyway but they get their warning.

August 14, 2010 by Solar Dragon
Our small team over at Dead Rising is divided over the subject, we are thinking about this, but not to make it more important than the actual wikia. Get what we mean?

August 14, 2010 by Mafia Mettaur
I'm afraid I have to say per all. People will probably spam just to get another achievement.

August 14, 2010 by A Wikia contributor