[OSM-talk] Awards

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    I just stumpled across this list of awards that Wikipedia seem to 
have for their contributors:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Service_awards

One part of me finds them funny, and interesting, almost as if they come 
from some sort of role playing game. Another part of me abhors the 
implicit hierarchy conferred by such awards, it is almost like service 
ranks in the military.

But whatever one thinks of them, they surely are fun for a lot of 
people, and give them a sense of achievement.

In light of the recent discussions (mostly on osmf-talk) about how we 
might find a way to automatically let people who have a certain number 
of edits or some other small contribution threshold become members of 
OSMF (or at least confer some voting rights to them), we could maybe 
think about how one would algorithmically "value" contributions to OSM, 
yielding not only a set of funny awards we can give to people, but 
perhaps also a definition of who is an "established contributor".

Bear in mind that contributions to OSM are not only edits, but also 
tracks uploaded, Wiki pages edited, code commited to SVN, or tiles 
rendered for tiles at home... and that some edits may require lots of work 
while others can be done almost automatically.

I'm interested to hear everybody's thoughts on the matter.

Bye
Frederik