Wiki Points system is a joke..

I'm going to make an example of a guy called S1LENT_ASSASSIN, others may know him as the top user on GiantBomb, don't make me laugh.

Our good friend S1LENT got 5083 points for this, 3,964 points for this, 1342 points for this, 1156 points for this

Seems the great contributor loves his racing games. I demand these points be taken off him. And don't say I'm being too serious about all this as I don't even care for the points look at my profile. I just feel sad that people hail this guy as the best user on this site.

Y'know, I actually have to agree. The fact that we gain points for uploading images is something that has convinced a lot of users to upload tons of screenshots and fanart so they can become one of the so called "top users". I'm not accusing all of the "top users" of getting where they are through this method, however, it seems to be the case with a large majority of them.

The reason this gets to me is that many users have claimed that these people are the "best contributors on the site", which is a bold-faced lie, as the best contributors are the ones who will take the time to write out great articles for games that they have played and enjoyed, and want other people to enjoy as well, however, these people recieve absolutely no credit for putting time and effort into these articles, while the ones who upload images are showered with praise.

My proposal? Remove points for uploading images. If people truly want to upload images to the site, let them do so without recieving points for minimal effort.

I feel sad that most of his written work is drivel, but that's a different matter.

You obviously do care about points if you think it's such an abomination that SA is the top point whore though. That's what people do. Most of us just don't care.

I really don't care that much. I fix grammar errors, upload a few pics here and there and just do random stuff. My only goal is to one day not have to have 1,000 that way I don't have to wait. I really don't care about how many points other people have.

whenever you have any type of reward system there will be people who abuse it. i have 700 points and i could have easily gotten 300 more if i made some stupid updates like that.
i believe in only making quality contributions

I agree that points shouldn't be awarded for uploading images, or should have a separate "image points" value, one you've got 1000 points you can edit anything, and uploading images doesn't mean you're going to be able to make good text edits.

I don't know who is "hailing" someone as the best user, just because someone is on top doesn't make them the best user or best contributor. Anyone can upload images and obtain many points. I agree the system should be rewarding users who contribute more to the actual text in a wiki than images.

I kinda agree with Disgaea's method of not rewarding people for image uploads. Somehow I think that most people would be angered by this. If points must be given for uploading images, make in minimal, like 0.2 points or something, otherwise not giving points for images sounds good to me.

i agree that the number of images he submitted is a bit excessive but at least that game it's gallery is full.

I have to agree with these complaints. I have written a number of articles, and the only satisfaction I truly get is viewing my own work, and imagining people using it. Before GB, I often browsed wikipedia whenever I needed that sort of objective video game information, now it has become GB, and I have become the provider of information. Of course it is all voluntary, and the only incentive are the points which determine a rank. I can gain hundreds of points in 30 minutes using Google image search, the print screen key on an emulator, or various other means. On the other hand, I can spend an hour summarizing a game plot, describing the system and controls, and giving an overview of everything the game has to offer, I get maybe 50 points. The problem is in the balance, or lack thereof, of the system. The things that truly make a wiki site, the information about each aspect, is not rewarded. There is greater value placed upon images, and in cases of old and outdated games, will probably never be viewed.
If I want to know what a game is about, for example the Atari classic M.U.L.E., then a screenshot will tell me absolutely nothing. M.U.L.E., despite being an old Atari game, is a surprisingly deep economic simulator which needs text to describe it. Other games, like the yearly Madden, can hardly be distinguished through imagery, and need text to describe what happened over the course of a year.
I hope that the staff can change how the point system works, for the sake of both writers and readers.

I have written up some things that have taken me a while to gather info for and obtained a modest some of points for doing so. I most definitely feel that users who have worked hard on wiki pages instead of spamming images should be the ones heralded.

Kind of agree that there shouldn't be a point reward for uploading pictures.

I must agree as well, uploading a crap ton of images and getting thousands of points from it is a bit unfair to people who actually make well written articles.

Just to chime in with something actually pertaining to the topic, 10 words for 1 point but an average of 2 or 3 points (if you gallery-whore it) per image is fucking ridiculous.

There I said it.

Yeah, I'm a closet point-lover >.>

Unless I've misunderstood the rules (or they've changed) the part that burnt me about images (until looking at some of S1LENT_ASSASSIN's) work wasn't getting a point for uploading them, but the ability to load one image and get points for it based on each gallery that it attaches to. I made a post about this back in mid August here. One game has just over 100 points that seem to be based mostly on images, while the other has 93 points and includes descriptions of game play, pictures, and is overall a better write up of a game.

"Unless I've misunderstood the rules (or they've changed) the part that burnt me about images (until looking at some of S1LENT_ASSASSIN's) work wasn't getting a point for uploading them, but the ability to load one image and get points for it based on each gallery that it attaches to. I made a post about this back in mid August here. One game has just over 100 points that seem to be based mostly on images, while the other has 93 points and includes descriptions of game play, pictures, and is overall a better write up of a game.

I'm with you that it gives the shaft to people who sit down and write out decently detailed game descriptions.

Any mods reading this who might have helpful suggestions on how to get voices heard to make a change to getting so many points for image uploading?

"

That's a bunch of bullshit, 5000 points for that?

To earn a lot of points all you have to do is find a bunch of low key games, and relate them to each other.

I must agree that pictures are a bad source of points.  I think that if pictures are to be given points each, then the articles should be given much more.  I don't have a lot myself but, one, I don't care that much, and two, I would rather type a nice page than upload a page with literally 1000 images.

I concur with the gist of this thread. Being able to mass upload images and bump yourself to the top of the list when someone spends a lot of time writing an article gets them nowhere. Not to mention the glitches which means that points aren't distributed correctly. There's nothing more disheartening than writing an article, getting no points and seeing yourself less appreciated than a swift Google Image search.

Pictures should just get 0 points.

We value image uploads. That's why they get points in the first place. But we don't want image uploads to prevent people from making text changes, either. It's not an easy problem, but we'll keep thinking about it. Thanks for your feedback.

"We value image uploads. That's why they get points in the first place. But we don't want image uploads to prevent people from making text changes, either. It's not an easy problem, but we'll keep thinking about it. Thanks for your feedback."

Hmm.

I think the problem is less that pictures earn points and more that points for writing need to be waited more heavily than they are.

"Hmm.

I think the problem is less that pictures earn points and more that points for writing need to be waited more heavily than they are."

As someone who both contributes to wiki articles and uploads images, I think the current system to be extremely unbalanced. For example, a while back I spent an hour or two uploading a bunch of concept art to the Okami page and got about 500 points for it. I've probably spent just as much time contributing to the wiki article, and I've only gotten about 100 points out of that. As the system works now, you get many more points out of an hour spent uploading images rather than an hour spent writing an article, and that's not very fair to the people who primarily upload articles.

I disagree with everyone in this thread who thinks that images should not be worth any points. Images are a valuable contribution to the site, and there should some semblance of a reward for taking the time to collect and upload images. I think the proposal mentioned earlier about separating article and image contributions is a pretty good idea, though I'm not sure if the site's infrastructure is set up to allow that to be possible. The system in place right now, however, is broken and needs to be changed.

This is definitely a problem. Jeff has already commented on this thread, so we know that the staff is aware of it.

HandsomeDead said:

"I concur with the gist of this thread. Being able to mass upload images and bump yourself to the top of the list when someone spends a lot of time writing an article gets them nowhere. Not to mention the glitches which means that points aren't distributed correctly. There's nothing more disheartening than writing an article, getting no points and seeing yourself less appreciated than a swift Google Image search."

• Points total is improperly calculated

This is a bug. Occasionally users may not be awarded points for some of their edits, thus making their points total incorrect. 

Yeah, do we really need 1688 pictures of F1 Career Challenge on Giantbomb? That's gotta be a waste of bandwidth, man. I became aware of the problem when one of the previous users with the most points was at the top for posting thousands of half-naked pictures of women like Carmen Electra. Now I like Carmen Electra and all, but I don't think Giantbomb should be the premiere places for looking up hot pictures of her, especially since her contribution to the gaming industry is undoubtably minimal.
I do think that it's good some users actually make their own screenshots to provide for Giantbomb and that people in general want to add more pictures, so I think it's okay for them to be worth some points, but I think it should be less. I've seen a lot of ugly game overview pages for important games. I think GB needs to put an emphasis on giving the most points to well written game articles, and maybe that'll encourage more users to spend some time writing good information about more games. Though, that's not to say all of the pages are bad, and as time goes on, more and more of them are shaping up quite nicely. But let's better reward the people putting hard work into making these pages look good.

well I kinda agree to an extent, I think all of my contributions, or at least most of them have been better than posting a shit load of pictures... but I don't really care about the points, I just made those contributions because I thought they were needed, and because I loved The Darkness. :3

And Image Whoring is used as a portal for many people, to shoot up almost immediately to live edits. I try to balance edits and image uploads out, but it's hard. I can spend an hour correcting things on the Crackdown page, changing details on a Far Cry page, then correcting the idiotic subjectiveness of the Assassin's Creed page and get maybe 30 points, but uploading images of fucking jukeboxes gets me more than that in less than 10 minutes XD

PHEW! I'm glad someone else complained about the image uploads. It wasn't classy for me to complain....I mean, WHAT? I mean, Yeah! Down with people who have fraudulent points?!
What? I mean No! I mean, I dunno! Maybe! Something?!

I think ripping screenshots from other sites and uploading them can be pretty shady; generally, the only screenshots of any value to me are the ones I took myself while playing through a game. It bums me out when I go to a game's gallery and see nothing but the promo shots off of a publisher's webpage (and even then incorrectly filed, such as the case with shots of older, less popular games...like the Build engine games) or are just a bunch of poorly sized, uncropped screen grabs of the first stage of a game (I'm looking at you, Star Fox), so I make it a point to try to replace those images with fresh, quality shots from either when I last played through the title or I'll play through the title just to replace the shots.

The big hold up for me (and I'm sure other people) from making huge edits to a majority of the articles is the absence of any sort of versioning system. Saving your work in notepad is great and all, but anyone at any point in time can jump into one of your entries, add "fart" and who knows how long it'll be before anyone notices it and fixes it? How about all of those people that love to go in and add sentence after sentence of barely understandable half English?

It doesn't hurt my feelings that I don't get more than a point or two for skimming an article and correcting improper instances of they're, their and there (or any number of other random grammar errors). Nor does it bum me out that I didn't get a whole lot of points for my work on the Build Engine page, because to me those are some of the most valuable points I've earned.  Ditto for the relatively low number of points I've earned from doing cover art scans; sure, they're worth less than the normal screenshots, but they have such a massive impact on a page's first impression that everything else is totally secondary.

What really grinds my gears is the lack of points for adding in game releases. That's one area that I think really needs to get revamped, because right now there's about 23,000 games on GB and only 8400 releases entered in. Perhaps if a point value were assigned to them then people would be more inclined to submit them? I'm not a total optimist and I know that there would be a lot of copy and paste entries from Wikipedia, Mobygames and Gamespot without any in depth fact checking, but there's at least an edit button so that you can correct improperly entered data (and yes, those sites do sometimes have incorrect release dates).

Random bits since this is the thread where everyone complains about stuff that annoys them on this site:

• If you're using DOSbox, use Normal3x, set your fullresolution to the max LCD/CRT resolution that you can support and use FRAPS to snap shots in BMP. Convert them to PNG before you upload them to save on space! Know how many colors you need! Police Quest 2 didn't use 24bit color and Terminator: Future Shock used more than 16 colors.
• If you're using any other emulator, make sure you leave filters like Scale2x and SuperEagle disabled. Use FRAPS to dump your screenshots so that they capture from the videobuffer. The SNES might have output in 8:7, but it was intended to be viewed in 4:3 (unless you have one of those mythical 8:7 TVs?). Similarly, CPS2 games might have output in 384x224, but that doesn't mean that you're not supposed to correct them to a 4:3 compatible resolution (and yes, they're meant to be 4:3).
• 9 times out of 10, use FRAPS to grab your ingame screenshots. 10 out of 10 times if you never played windowed games.
• Buy a cheap scanner/copier/printer, damn it. Let's get that coverart submitted. Greatest Hits, Platinum Hits, Player's Choice, original release, whatever. Slide those covers out of the cases, put them on the scanner, get them in at 300dpi, rotate them to make them as rectangular as possible, and submit that stuff. Front and back! Sideart if applicable. Let's go!
• Buy a cheap video capture card, damn it. Tons of console games need lovin' here. Stuff you can't reliable emulate, like PS2, Xbox, Wii and Gamecube. If you've got a HD capture card like the Black Magic Intensity Pro or a Hauppauge HD-PVR and you're not submitting high resolution material for PS3 and Xbox360 games, I'm going to punch you through the internet. I swear.
  
• When you grab screenshots from a console game with a capture card, don't forget to crap out the overscan area and properly resize the image. 16:9 images still capture at 720x480 (or whatever your capture card is nabbing at). Chances are if you're smart enough to know what DScaler is then you know what time it is.
• XnView is a lot like the classic ACDSee that everyone loved back in the day. It'll be your bestest friend as you crop, resize, rotate, straighten, scan, whatever. If you're comfortable with something else, use that something else. If you need a swiss army knife, use XnView.
• Hamburgers.

"It wasn't classy for me to complain....

well think about this. before you accuse people. I essentially made the super smash bros melee page what it is with all the text. lets say there were no images and I had the points i have from it now,(over 5,000) and someone with live edits edits the page and deletes all my work. You would accuse me for something just cause someone deleted it? no need to complain about peoples points. Points for images is a smart idea cause the reason for this site is they are building a big database. Images are a huge important part of that so no need to complain. To me its harder to get points from images then text cause it takes long to load a bunch up and stuff.

"I'm going to make an example of a guy called S1LENT_ASSASSIN, others may know him as the top user on GiantBomb, don't make me laugh.

Our good friend S1LENT got 5083 points for this, 3,964 points for this, 1342 points for this, 1156 points for this

Seems the great contributor loves his racing games. I demand these points be taken off him. And don't say I'm being too serious about all this as I don't even care for the points look at my profile. I just feel sad that people hail this guy as the best user on this site."

"well think about this. before you accuse people. I essentially made the super smash bros melee page what it is with all the text. lets say there were no images and I had the points i have from it now,(over 5,000) and someone with live edits edits the page and deletes all my work. You would accuse me for something just cause someone deleted it? no need to complain about peoples points. Points for images is a smart idea cause the reason for this site is they are building a big database. Images are a huge important part of that so no need to complain. To me its harder to get points from images then text cause it takes long to load a bunch up and stuff."

I don't think the points matter in a simple numeric way. What people want is their number to reflect the effort they've put into a page. After all, there's no point scribing in depth for hours if no one is going to read it or know it exists.

"MasturbatingBear said:

"well think about this. before you accuse people. I essentially made the super smash bros melee page what it is with all the text. lets say there were no images and I had the points i have from it now,(over 5,000) and someone with live edits edits the page and deletes all my work. You would accuse me for something just cause someone deleted it? no need to complain about peoples points. Points for images is a smart idea cause the reason for this site is they are building a big database. Images are a huge important part of that so no need to complain. To me its harder to get points from images then text cause it takes long to load a bunch up and stuff."

You're right. I actually made a whole page for Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. Someone else makes another page of the same game a few days after mine and in a week, my page got deleted. It took awhile to find all the info too. he also got many points for his page too(more than mine).

For me, it wasn't the points but the time and effort I put into making the page and then it goes down the drain."

"LightYagami245 said:

"MasturbatingBear said:

"well think about this. before you accuse people. I essentially made the super smash bros melee page what it is with all the text. lets say there were no images and I had the points i have from it now,(over 5,000) and someone with live edits edits the page and deletes all my work. You would accuse me for something just cause someone deleted it? no need to complain about peoples points. Points for images is a smart idea cause the reason for this site is they are building a big database. Images are a huge important part of that so no need to complain. To me its harder to get points from images then text cause it takes long to load a bunch up and stuff."

You're right. I actually made a whole page for Before Crisis: Final Fantasy VII. Someone else makes another page of the same game a few days after mine and in a week, my page got deleted. It took awhile to find all the info too. he also got many points for his page too(more than mine).

For me, it wasn't the points but the time and effort I put into making the page and then it goes down the drain."

no I understand about the effort. I mean how do you think I felt when I had to redo it so many times( which is infact how i got so many points in that page). Now im making my own pages and doing lots of things without doing it for the points. But still. Points are awesome."

I agree. Image contributions are an easy way to earn points, but once I got past 1000, i focused more on fixing more important information on pages, such as release dates (mainly these since you cant submit reviews for games without a release date), platforms, publishers, etc and other small things like grammar and typos in articles.

Woah, hang on, you can get points for uploading images? I uploaded the first concept art image for Deus Ex 3 and I didn't get anything for it.

Yeah, you get points for adding images to games/characters/locations/objects,etc. One point per page it's added to, plus another point per gallery. So with screenshots you could get up to three points per image. That seems way excessive.

I agree with having separate points for images.  Since the Pending Subs section has two categories (wiki and images), why not have separate points for each type of submission?

I don't even know if I should comment on this, as I am one of the top "image whores", but something tells me that I should...

The fact that I can't write articles really kills me. Why can't I? Well, my native language is Spanish, not English, and in my humble opinion my English sucks (I've been told that it doesn't, but to me it does). It became totally (and painfully) obvious to me the other day, when I started writing an article about Aigis, one of my favorite characters. While I was writing my "opus", some other user posted their Aigis article and it was a thousand times better than the pathetic little thing I was doing. I'm glad that I didn't get to finish mine (and now I want that other user to finish writing all the other Persona articles ^_^). I have posted an article, but I think it sucks (someone checked it for me before I posted it).

It is a bit painfull to me that I'm labelled as an "image whore", but, I guess that is what I am. You see, for years (I don't even remember when I started) I've been collecting fan art on anime / games. When I heard that Jeff was starting a new site I knew for sure I was joining and was going to see what I could help with (I don't contribute to any other site). But when I heard that fan art was allowed, then I became even happier, as it is, after all, something I've loved all along.

I do not upload everything I have / find, either, I only upload what I like the most. In some cases this results in a ton of images, such as with Hatsune Miku: I uploaded 800 or so images, out of the 3000+ I found (most of them safe to post, I think). I was so surprised when I found so many that I liked that I asked 2 other users if I should post them or if I would be banned for it / if they thought it was wrong. In some other cases I find a lot of fan art / images but I don't like them much, so I won't post them. I guess this is hard to believe coming from me. Oh, well. I think I would have at least double the points I currently have if I uploaded everything I find. (A conservative estimate on my part.)

I help in ways that I can. I've always hated saying what it is that I do to help, as I think I should do things "silently". But I'll make a bit of an exception, as this thread hits too close to home, I guess (I was #1 before the assasin killed me ^_^, and I could have been the example used). I delete stuff requested and post in the Delete threads because I don't want people to waste their time trying to do something I've already done. My ideal forum post count would be 0. That is the kind of person I am, I guess. Not very community minded. ^_^ I have used the crowd moderation tool since day 1 and have quite a few moderations. This is something nobody notices, except those that enter that page and see me frequently there. I try to fight against the MapleStory onslaughts... and it isn't easy. ^_^ Again, I help with what I can. I wish it was more, for sure...

I like the idea mentioned before of two separate rankings (images / articles), plus maybe keep the global one. I would be #last on the articles one. ^_^

Anyway, sorry for posting so much text. I apologize. Maybe I will look even worse after this. Oh, well...

"I really don't care that much. I fix grammar errors, upload a few pics here and there and just do random stuff. My only goal is to one day not have to have 1,000 that way I don't have to wait. I really don't care about how many points other people have."

whoa.. hey... your English is much better than mine, and I only speak English with Spanish as a distant third cousin.  Don't worry about it friend.

and for comedic effect I'll try to translate what I just said into Spanish:

Whoa... oi ver... Su Ingles es muy grande por mi,  y solamente hablo Ingles con Espanol al un tres hermano distante.  No moleste mi amigo.

You get a lot less points for images than you used to. When I uploaded my Sonic Advance 2 screenshots I got 3 points for each image; 1 point for it going into the "GBA Screenshots" gallery, 1 point for the "Screenshots" gallery, and 1 more for the "All images" gallery. It doesn't do that anymore so it's actually a lot more balanced than you might think.

And getting screenshots isn't always just a case of going into google and looking up a game. Usually the screenshots will either be watermarked or be in crappy quality. I prefer taking my own screenshots as they are in just about the best quality you can get. That involves playing through the games and taking each individual screenshot myself, which is a lot more work and effort than just copying a bunch from some website.

Oh and the amount of trouble you get from the yellow error bar when you are trying to upload hundreds of screenshots is infuriating, it often makes the process take ten times longer than it should.

Not that I'm an image points whore, I try to contribute a bit of everything to GiantBomb. I thought I would just point some things out to balance the argument a bit.

And getting screenshots isn't always just a case of going into google and looking up a game. Usually the screenshots will either be watermarked or be in crappy quality. I prefer taking my own screenshots as they are in just about the best quality you can get. That involves playing through the games and taking each individual screenshot myself, which is a lot more work and effort than just copying a bunch from some website.

Oh and the amount of trouble you get from the yellow error bar when you are trying to upload hundreds of screenshots is infuriating, it often makes the process take ten times longer than it should.

As a person who has heavily image whored, I would not mind giving up every point that I have gotten for image uploads. It really feels dirty. Although I am part of the "problem", I agree with a lot of the complaints.

If releases were worth points then you could farm the hell out of those (which, imo, would be an awesome thing for the site and for those like jlrm01 that would like to contribute more but perhaps aren't comfortable enough with their English to hammer out articles).