I think it's a very important idea that will be most useful in incentivizing people to produce open content or otherwise donate their time and money. It's the idea behind the new StackExchange user pages:
>How many people have you helped?
> “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”.
I think it should be a very high priority for the project to allow users to quickly and attractively integrate this into their userpage (and by default for new users). Could help reverse the slow atrophy of the wikipedia user base.
Well, I have an unbaked thought that says assigning numbers to people's contribution to the world is going to create the wrong kind of incentives.
The problem is that it's (probably) impossible to summarize someone's effects on other people into a number. We're seeing that even quantifying school performance ends up being counter-productive.
For me, the ideal is that instead of seeing how many people you've helped, or how much you've helped them, or any other quantified view of your work, you are just somehow able to see the story of how you helped them. Who did you help, in what situation? And it doesn't have to be something big like saving lives. Just, mundane, everyday stuff.
I think that's more of a concern when there is a principal-agent problem. Yes, if you pay me X $/widget but are unable to measure widget quality well, then I may try to maximize number of widgets produced at the expense of quality. (And it may make sense to use other incentive structures.) But if I'm trying to help people, it's much less likely that I'll stupidly maximize a metric (# of page views) by lowering quality. What have I to gain? (This of course because a problem as soon as you start tangibly rewarding me based on the metric, or if the metric influences my public reputation, etc.)
I see. But I think this "system that lets you see how what you do affects other people" should be applied to everything we do, not just charity. It should be mainly about your job and what you do that pays you.
I wanna say why I think this is a good idea, but I'm curious to know whether it's obvious to other people why this could be a good thing.
>How many people have you helped?
> “People Reached” is a new way to see just how much your efforts here matter. For the first time ever, you can see roughly how many times an actual human being – very likely one looking for help – found your contributions here. Personally, I like to call it the “Saving-the-frigging-world-o-meter”.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/04/two-new-user-pages-one...
This is available crudely for Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics http://stats.grok.se/
I think it should be a very high priority for the project to allow users to quickly and attractively integrate this into their userpage (and by default for new users). Could help reverse the slow atrophy of the wikipedia user base.