User blog:ZootyCutie/A little talk about Badge Farming....

I made a blog:ZootyCutie/A quick reminder thanks to the new badges... blog post a bit back about the Badges, on how you shouldn't let the points blind you from constructive edits. Now, I'm going to talk about something that's common on badge-based Wikis and is horribly frowned upon: Badge Farming.

This is where a user continues to make and undo a pointless edit (say, removing a period and replacing it over-and-over or adding only two words at a time to a new edit and continuing to add to the sentence slowly with new edits bit-by-bit). This is horrible editing skills, only showing that you're focusing on getting the badges, rather than the true edits. It also clogs up the activity page with pointless edits.

Now, something that is NOT Badge Farming is, say changing a tense to a proper form or correcting a word that's spelled wrong. You're doing something correct for the sake of the Wiki. Though, say you kept changing the tense or word spelling. THEN, it would be considered Badge Farming.

Remember, we're a Wiki for factual information first, the badges are just a nice little incentive to get us to try and make CONSTRUCTIVE edits!