Talk:Author Thanks

Thanks vs. views

Interesting proposal, thanks for putting it together.

I suspect that thanking is effective when it's personal -- you either recognize the person who's thanking you, or you can find out more about them, or they self-identify through the message attached to the "thank you". An impersonal "30843 people thanked you for this article" may well dilute the effectiveness of more personal thank-you messages.

On sites like deviantART (which of course is very different from Wikipedia), viewership is often used as a both public and personal way to recognize accomplishment. The aggregate of all views, or views of specific objects, are divided into shiny milestones that users can showcase to feel pride in their accomplishment.

In Wikipedia too, I think viewership may be a better proxy for reader recognition of an author's work than an impersonal thank-you count. And I suspect that Wikipedians would actually prefer a slightly more data-rich presentation of viewership trends across articles they've contributed to over mere shiny milestones, and might even love notifications of the type "The article XX you started just saw a massive spike of viewership in South Korea". Tricky and easy to get into diminishing returns but I think worth thinking about as well.--Eloquence (talk) 06:36, 21 February 2014 (UTC)