Need ideas for rewarding the users of a wiki

Question

I need ideas as to how best reward users of a wiki to make them motivated to keep contributing in a constructive manner. Articles can be upvoted, so the thought is to reward the contributors based on how much they have contributed to a specific article as well as how many upvotes it has gotten. The idea so far is to use a system of rewarding points to those who wrote the article ,and points from the amount of bytes the user have generated by editing articles.

The immediate problems i see is how to correctly assess when to give points in situations such as when a user edits parts of an article that has already been edited before. When a user edits for the sake of correcting misspellings(an example is a user who edits a single word), whether this should give points as i don’t see how the backend would distinct between a user correcting a mistake in spelling or farming points by making small changes here and there.

There is also the issue with how to manage the byte contribution point system with regards to how to handle a situation when a user’s contribution have been overridden by an edit, if they should get to keep their points from contributing bytes now that their original piece of text is gone.

The intention is to make the user feel rewarded for their work without making the reward system too competitive(making them focus more on generating points rather than producing content of value).

Answer 1

Give the major concern appears to be avoiding low value edits you could cap the amount per day and edits per article. For example instead of a user being able to apply multiple edits to a page one word at a time you make it so they are only rewarded for editing a page once a day. Additional edits would give them no additional points however would still be accepted. It doesn't have to be a page either you could use paragraph or whatever level of granularity works for the content. The most important thing is to track all of this over time and do spot checks on whether the top users are indeed the ones that have contributed value according to whatever metric you decide is important.

User always try and game any points system so whatever you choose I would make sure to track enough information so that you can change your algorithm in the future and understand how it will work.