The points balance regarding Credits seems a bit off.

Now that's not to say that editing credits isn't worthy of any acknowledgement for the work, but... in comparison to the point accumulation just from writing up the actual game article, it seems a little out of whack. This little oddity first occurred to me when I myself went around editing classifications for voice actors.

There are a lot of unclassified credits for voice actors on the wiki as you would expect, and when you've got individuals such as Steve Blum, where like half of his (staggeringly huge) portfolio was unclassified, the points very quickly started to add up. Hell, as you can see I'm even the top editor on the page! Despite the fact that pretty much all of my contributions have been via the credits, which frankly seems unfair.

For something as simple as credits, you should basically get like a single point per credit I'd say; another for potentially filling in some miscellaneous details per credit. So then even if you do happen to single-handedly fill out the credits with every programmer, artist, and janitor involved with the development, you'll still only perhaps find yourself with like... maybe 300 points at most. Otherwise it at the very least seems like a system that is potentially ripe for abuse. And again while the work may be boring and time-consuming--as I can speak from experience--it shouldn't have the possibility to completely overshadow any and all other such contributions on a page.

Also, there should be a ''type'' to show you've edited credits at that, much like how it's distinguished from Game Overview when you're editing, say, a game's Release details.

I agree completely.

As long as we're criticizing the points system, edits made in the image gallery get you points, but not for the game itself, if that makes any sense. I think I earned around 10000+ points on the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES page (from 4000+ images, mind you), but it's not recognized on the page. So if I have to edit the images beyond uploading/shifting images around galleries/captioning them, unless I've written a lot on the actual wiki page, I'm shit out of luck.

Was actually interested in figuring out what you guys were talking about so I checked the wiki history for the user mentioned above and can somebody explain how they received 1000 wiki points on Bound to Flame when the wiki is still empty? Still kind of unsure of the whole wiki point system myself.

@i_stay_puft: It's probably because he filled in the credits, that section seems to be complete.

While I do think credits are pretty important, the points values for everything seems a bit off, even random at times. I've gotten about 200 points for adding developer and publisher credits to existing releases at times, while submitting a new release with all the same stuff only yields about 50 points.

It also seems like submitting the same data gives you different amounts of points depending on where you do it - if you go to a person page and adds a game and role to the wiki from there you get a different amount of points as compared to when you go to the game's credits page and adds the person there. Same goes for characters, objects and concepts.

You can see from the edit history what sorts of changes have been made. For example, this earned over 200 points: http://www.giantbomb.com/wiki/moderation/105522/

@fisk0: Yeah, definitely. It's still a little harsher and more consistent than it used to be, but at the same time you can never be sure how many points you'll ultimately be awarded for doing what... That is besides credits ;P It's all undoubtedly very complicated, though, and will always have its... kinks, lest they decide to remove the points system altogether.

Oh wow, I never even knew you could do that! I mean I obviously knew you could check who last made edits to a page, but not specifically what.

It seems like adding new people while doing credits earns more points as well, but I am not entirely sure. I certainly think a fair amount of points should be earned from credits and the way it is done on this site is very time consuming and boring, but it does seem like maybe it is skewed a little high compared to filling out a page.

Not directly related to the topic at hand but is the only way to see credits to click the related pages tab? Because everything else is accessible directly from the main wiki page and i had to search for a while to find the credits to begin with... this seems poorly designed, unless i'm just an idiot. That's also entirely possible.

You also used to get points on both sides of the association (i.e. points for the game and for the person). This hasn't worked for any associations since the big 2013 redesign. So you can actually pick and choose which side you want your extremely inflated points to appear on. I could add a thousand credits for a person, and if I did it from the game side you wouldn't have a clue who added all those credits.

@lordandrew: That's crazy. I did always dislike the old wiki way and this seems like the best solution. I never liked editing a movie and realizing I somehow had 15 or so pages each with only 1 wiki point. I guess the best fix for this was to only have the page you were editing give you the points.

I'm confused about the initial post. Are you saying credit editing yields more points than writing or the opposite? If I remember writing was always the way to earn big chunks of points quickly.

As a man who doesn't give a fuck about virtual e-points, whuh?

@finaldasa: I liked the old way. If you're creating an association, you are affecting both pages. You should get credit for both. Why should you be able to pick which one you want points on?

The thread is about getting too many points for credits, so much that it can easily outweigh more significant text contributions. Since you don't seem to have made any credit edits since the redesign, you have probably never seen this.

Credits are one of several known wiki points issues that are on the list of things to rebalance when the wiki (hopefully) gets some attention later this year. Releases, release dates, and associations are other problem areas that are high on the list.

I think you should only get that many wiki points for editing credits if they're for an old-ass Japanese console game where the credit roll is nothing but nicknames, and you have to decipher who is who.

@chaser324 said:

That's good to hear. Though promises concerning the wiki have been made ad infinitum at this point. Anyone else remember when Jeff said he was planning on doing a video series to act as tutorials for editing the wiki?.. I think he may have done one at least, but even still it didn't quite live up to the ideal.

Point is (lol...) I'm not going to hold my breath, though with the new hires this does seem more plausible than it has been in the past.

@yummylee: I'm just going to remind you that you cannot "call-out" another user in a forum post on the site. Those segments from this topic have been removed.

@zombiepie said:

Wait, what? I wasn't calling out the user as a means of ridicule, I was using his contributions as an example of how insanely high the amount of points can be attained just via credits.