User:SMcCandlish/Wikibucks

Wikibucks are a form of virtual currency. They can only be used on Wikipedia (and even then only on a specific-language Wikipedia). They exist:
 * Most importantly, as a form exchange that can be used to elicit and compensate the consultation of other editors
 * As another of various ways to personally reward or thank other editors
 * As an encouragement to edit Wikipedia frequently, regularly and responsibly
 * As a fun reputation market experiment in social capital
 * As a form of harmlessly competitive wikigame, that actually encourages productive work on the encyclopedia instead of serving as a distraction

Wikibucks are not:
 * A means of bribing other editors for votes in AfD, RfA or other consensus discussions &mdash; the transfer of Wikibucks takes place on Wikipedia, and all such transactions leave records (and removing the records simply leaves a record of having done that).
 * A measure of the value of an editor's contributions to the project &mdash; since Wikibucks are meant to be spent, a low Wikibucks account isn't indicative of anything.

Wikibucks can be represented with the Greek symbol ψ (lower-case psi) similarly to the use of $, £, ¥, and €: "I have ψ1,200 to spend." Wikibucks are never fractional, though writing it as ψ1,200.00 won't hurt anything.

The basics
To participate, you must have a real user account; Wikibucks do not work with IP addresses. Create a User talk:/Wikibucks page (case-sensitive - not /wikibucks; and note that it is in the "User talk:" not "User:" namespace). Put the Wikibucks page template at the top of it, then save. This will create your Wikibucks account.

Wikibucks are automatically calculated, in the following ways: These are the only ways in which Wikibucks are actually generated by the system.
 * Every 10 edits made are worth one wikibuck.
 * Every day that the user is logged in and makes at least one edit is worth one wikibuck.

For example, a user who has made a total of 10,000 edits, and has been a Wikipedian registered at that user account for 1,000 days, but was only logged in and did any editing on 400 of those 1,000 days, has a starting Wikibucks account of ψ1,400 (10,000/10 = 1,000 for edits; plus 400 for active editing days).

Getting and giving Wikibucks
The whole point of acruing Wikibucks is giving them away. You way wish to award someone ψ10 gratuitously for a great edit, or ψ100 for doing a lot of work on multiple article cleanup. You can use the {{subst:Wikibucks gift}} talk page template (usage detailed below) for this purpose (in addition to the actual transfer steps, also covered below), so that the gift is visible, not unlike a little barnstar.

But the main reason behind the idea is to give Wikibucks away as offered rewards. Perhaps you are just short of getting an article to Good Article status, but cannot find documentation for one last fact in the article. On the article's talk page, you could offer a ψ150 reward for anyone who can reliably source that detail. Or perhaps your biography on a Chinese sports figure is missing the Traditional and Simplified Chinese versions of the person's name and their Pinyin equivalent, and you don't actually know Chinese. You could offer a 300 Wikibucks reward for this information.

The concept is similar to that of the central idea in the film Pay It Forward, but with the addition of constructive motivation. Wikibucks can help individual users achieve their particular temporary Wikipedian goals, particularly where outside help is needed from other editors. The penalties for disruptive editing, below, are especially intended to reinforce this, by removing the ability of editors to gather others' editing resources to their own projects and articles of focus if they are habitually disruptive of the work of others. Meanwhile, very active editors in good faith, and especially those who go out of their way to help others (earning Wikibucks along the way) rather than focus exclusively on their own topics of interest will be in a better position to seek assitance when they do want to get something done that is important to them.

Note: The numbers used as examples above are not in any way normative; the actual perceived value of a Wikibuck will necessarily be determined by the virtual marketplace of Wikipedia editors, and change over time.

Losing Wikibucks
It is possible to lose Wikibucks by engaging in disruptive behavior. Having one's user talk page flagged with warning templates can cost the user Wikibucks in the amount of 100 times the number-level of the warning (warning templates that are unnumbered are counted as level 1. Blocks (for any length of time) each count as level 5.  Wikibucks lost this way cannot be recovered, and are not transferred to anyone else; they are simply fines.

For example, a user with ψ1,400 who is tagged with Uw-test1 and Uw-vandal2, and was blocked for a while for disruptive behavior by the Arbitration Committee, loses {100 x 1) + (100 x 2) + (100 x 5) wikibucks, or 100 + 200 + 500 = ψ800, and is now down to ψ600! Disruptive behavior has a very deleterious effect on one's Wikibucks account.

Any user can apply these fines. For instance, if neither of the two editors who warning-flagged the user bothered to apply the fines, but the blocking admin did apply the 500 point block fine, any third party may retroactively apply the other 300 Wikibucks in penalties at any time.

Penalties cannot be assessed for disagreements or talk page testiness, AfD votes someone didn't agree with, or for other reasons; only for applications of the accepted user warning templates. These are the templates listed at WP:UWT that begin with "uw-", and obsolete templates that served the exact same functions, such as Test and its numbered equivalent, Test1. The old Blatantvandal template is the equivalent of the new Uw-vandalism4im, and as such is a level-4 warning.

How to transfer Wikibucks
To give someone Wikibucks:
 * Go to your Wikibucks page and click the "+" button near the top of the page. In the editing window, insert the  template, such as, sign with  , add an something about what the transaction is for (like the "Memo:" field on a paper check) in the subject field, and save.  This will create a new transaction record deducting the specified number of Wikibucks from your available total.
 * Go to the recipient's Wikibucks page (User talk:JaneDoe230X/Wikibucks in this example), and follow the same steps, but use the template - the same amount, but with your username added, as the sender, and again sign with  .  When the page reloads, their Wikibucks balance will be updated with the transfer.

In either case, if you have manually created the entry instead of clicking on "+", the "memo" goes in the   part of the edit summary.


 * If the transaction was a random gift for good editing or some other praiseworthy action, rather than simple completion of a "reward offered" task, you may also wish to leave a message on his/her user talk page with a template, since this will be praise visible to other visitors of the page.  If the recipient does not yet have a Wikibucks page, do not create one for him/her, and just use {{subst:Wikibucks invite}} instead of {{subst:Wikibucks gift}}, with the same parameters (the invite version looks the same other than it also contains a link to this documentation.  The gift and invite templates are the only Wikibucks templates that should be subst:'d.

You can use the first two steps above to transfer your own Wikibucks from an old account to a new one. Do no do this between accounts on different WikiMedia systems, e.g. from en.wikipedia.org to de.wikipedia.org or to wiktionary.org. Your participation in each WikiMedia project is a separate matter, and they are all largely separate communities.

To accept Wikibucks, you may wish to examine the sender's Wikibucks page's history, to ensure that the bucks are legitimate. If you are satisfied that they are, you don't have to do anything further. You can reject the giving of Wikibucks to you, for any reason, simply by removing the Wikibucks receive transaction record from your own Wikibucks page. It is not required to notify the sender, though it is courteous to do so if the rejection is for reasons other than cheating (see below) by the sender, since they will probably want to delete their corresponding Wikibucks send record and restore their bucks; you can even do this for the sender if you like. The edit summary in both cases should consist of or include the words "transaction rejected by recipient". If someone sent you Wikibucks but you did not already have a Wikibucks page, you can create the Wikibucks receive message yourself or ask the sender to do it, after you've created the page as described above. If you do it yourself, include the words "retroactive receipt" in the edit summary so that the edit does not look suspicious. Use the timestamp from the Wikibucks invite you received on your talk page. You are not obligated in any way to participate, and the sender should not rescind the transaction if you do not, but instead should pretend that you simply gave the gift away to charity or something, since you might change your mind 3 years later. However, as above you can remove the transaction from the sender's Wikibucks page as "transaction rejected by recipient".

To fine someone Wikibucks for user warnings they have received for disruptive behavior:
 * Copy the exact timestamp, including the time and "(UTC)" of the user warning tag on the user's talk page (User talk:JaneDoe230X for example), or the talk archive page containing the warning. If you were not the warning author, read the text there, and make sure that the warning editor/admin did not later rescind the warning, the block was not overtuned by the Arbitration Committee, etc. I.e., ensure that the warning/block is legitimate. Read the code and make sure that it actually did use one of the user-warning templates (with or without additional commentary included with it, as is sometimes done to explain the warning in more detail).
 * Next examine the disruptive user's Wikibucks page (User talk:JaneDoe230X/Wikibucks in this example), and ensure that a fine for this disruption incident has not already been applied by someone else. If it has not, then use the "+" button on the user's Wikibucks page and add the  template, pasting in the entire timestamp in place of "TIMESTAMP", and a number, 1-5, corresponding to the level of the warning in place of "WARNINGLEVEL", sign with   after the template, annotate the nature of the violation (e.g. "Previously unfined uw-spam2 warning") in the subject field, and save.  If you have manually created the entry instead of clicking on "+", the annotation goes in the    part of the edit summary.

Do NOT add any additional commentary to the user's talk page about this; doing so may constitute a personal attack. They have already been user-warned and now Wikibucks-fined, and that is enough. Also, it is generally courteous and forgiving not to levy fines for a single instance of a level-1 warning, but only if there are multiple level-1 warnings, or a level-2 or higher warning in addition to the original level-1.

Don't cheat
All of the following constitute outright user page vandalism, and engaging in them may get you blocked:
 * Adding fines that do not have corresponding user warnings, or intentionally adding multiple fines for the same warning
 * Removing fines from your own or anyone else's Wikibucks pages (the sole exceptions being that 1. you may rescind a fine that you yourself issued; other users remain free to re-add it, and in that case the original finer is not entitled to remove it again; and 2. that you may remove a duplicate fine from your own)
 * Falsifying transfers out of another user's Wikibucks account
 * Falsifying transfers into your own or another's Wikibucks account
 * Intentionally using false numbers in transactions (i.e. deducting 200 from the senders acount and giving 500 to the recipient)
 * Intentionally removing or altering transactions to not function correctly any longer, e.g. to give a false Wikibucks account total (but note that deleting a Wikibucks send if the corresponding Wikibucks receive was rejected by the recipient is a legitimate action)
 * Falsifying the memos/annotations left by others, on your own or anyone else's Wikibucks page; as with talk posts, it is not polite to even correct others' typo graphical errors (fixing broken template usage is an exception of course)
 * Using any means to completely delete your or anyone else's Wikibucks page and/or its edit history, or blanking it (see above about removing transactions) since this would allow the creation of a new Wikibucks page that did not account for spent/lost Wikibucks. Excpetion: If you wish to stop participating in the Wikibucks program, you can add Wikibucks nothanks to the very top of your Wikibucks page, and simply ignore the page from then on.  You can also have the page administratively deleted, but if this is done the page must be salted, and if you later change your mind, it must be restored as it was, including edit history.  There is no clean slate.
 * And of course deleting user warnings from your own or another's talk page has long been considered user page vandalism, other than to archive them as per talk page archiving procedures (the sole exception being that if you were the one who left the warning, you are free to rescind it later; if you do so, please also rescind any fine for it - simply delete the fine from the Wikibucks page. On the user talk page it is generally, though not universally preferred that the rescinded warning be struck out .)

An exception to the prohibition against monkeying with others' Wikibucks pages is the existence of bogus Wikibucks pages for IP addresses; these should simply be blanked on sight, and replaced with Wikibucks ineligible (or administratively deleted and salted). In the rare case of a real user account that looks like an IP address, the ower of the account should preface their Wikibucks page template with the Wikibucks realaccount template to forestall such blanking. Wikibucks doesn't work with IP addresses because there is no way to ascertain that they are the same user (thus neither bucks awarded nor deducted for disruption can be known to be accurately applied.) In addition, some IP addresses are proxies used by literally thousands of users, and could rack up a grossly disproportionate number of Wikibucks in a short time period that do not reflect the participation anyone in particular.

The same editor using multiple accounts to give one account more Wikibucks is perfectly fine, since all of the Wikibucks have to be legitimately earned in the first place.

Please be warned that it is considered amazingly bad form to solicit Wikibucks or demand them pre-emptively or retroactively for helping anyone or for working on an article. Doing so is considered disruptive editing, and may cause you to be flagged with a civility user warning.

Keep the Wikibucks page clean
Please do not use the Wikibucks page as a talk page; it should only contain the Wikibucks page template, and Wikibucks transactions. Using it to leave comments or chat may cause your Wikibucks to fail to be calculated. Any user may move chatter from your Wikibucks page to your talk page, or fix the functionality of malformed entries on your Wikibucks page. If for some reason you need to add additional templates or notes to this page, it must be done at the top, above the Wikibucks page template. The template should not be subst:'d. Nor should any Wikibucks templates other than {{subst:Wikibucks gift}} and {{subst:Wikibucks invite}}.