From Luke:

New feature that would allow us to incentivize tasks (e.g. proofreading The Sequences ebook) with LW karma.

My best guess is that the easiest way to do this is to set it up so that admins can manually add chunks of karma to a user account, but when doing so they must specify a reason, and as a matter of policy that reason must always be "This user performed task X, which was previously assigned a value of Y karma points."

Our first use-case for this would be to set up proofreading the sequences as a volunteer project at SingularityVolunteers.org. We'd promise people 100 karma for every 5 hours of work on the project, and we'd have volunteer coordinators checking to see whether people's claims of work roughly match with the output. Then a particular LW admin would give the karma rewards once per month, or something like that.

Karma rewards for tasks should be listed publicly, I think, to address concerns that it will be abused by admins. There should probably be a single page where anyone can view all the latest karma rewards given. Users receiving karma rewards should also be notified via their inbox.

As always, your feedback on how best to implement the feature is most welcome.

This is going to need two additions to the site UI - one for admins to access the reward page, and one for users to view recent rewards. The admin link can probably be added as a button in the sidebar near preferences/logout/etc. I can't think of a great place for the user-side link though, any ideas? If there's no good place for a link, it could also be put in the sidebar and be directly viewable on all pages, as recent posts and upcoming meetups are.

I guess just make a separate page that lists all karma rewards, newest at the top, and link that page below the 'TOP CONTRIBUTORS, ALL TIME' section in the sidebar. No need to list a few recent karma rewards in the sidebar, though.

The current sidebar is: user area | nearest meetups | recent comments | recent posts | recent wiki edits | new on OB | tags | top contributors 30 days | top contributors all time

… which seems to be thematically organised rather than strictly organised by importance.

"Recent karma awards" seems to fit that list after "recent wiki edits", and would fit a little better if we showed the two recent awards. The cost of making the sidebar a little longer seems to me to be small given its current length… but its current length is large, and makes every page on the site fairly complex.

ALTERNATIVELY

Most of the sidebar (other than recent comments and posts) is little used (based on clicks). We could move Tags, the two Top Contributors widgets and the sitemeter widget (need to check license) to /about below the wiki content on that page, and add recent karma rewards there. We could add a link to that page titled "more site data" at the bottom of the sidebar.

Moving Tags, the sitemeter widget (unless this makes it stop counting hits), and the all-time Contributors to /about below the Wiki content makes sense to me. I'd keep the top Contributors in the last 30 on the sidebar. It would be nice to show top all-time karma awards on the /about page but only show a karma sidebar if there's been a karma award in the last 30 days, and then put it above New on OB. Failing that, I'd say put it below Contributors, Last 30 Days. Other opinions?

Copied sidebar comments into: http://code.google.com/p/lesswrong/issues/detail?id=387

Is there a reason this hasn't been closed?

Not that I know of; seems done to me.