In Reply to: There is no *compete* to worry about in Where's George? (m) posted by Dave From Central MAss on February 7, 2003 at 11:46 AM:
: If you are competing, then you are in this for all the wrong reasons. WG is about tracking money, not who can enter more faster to rack up hits.
It used to be. Once upon a time, it didn't matter if some users had more opportunities to get hits than others, as long as all the hits occurred through natural circulation. But at some point a while ago it was decided that we shouldn't enter bills we get from other georgers, even naturally. And recently, Hank has explicitly said that he's deleting hits simply because they occur in bunches--even if they got that way naturally *and* even if the hitter isn't a georger and had no idea that there was anything "wrong" with entering all those bills. That sounds very much like an attempt to "level the playing field" for the competitive types: We can't have some users getting a dozen easy hits when others don't have that chance.... We've never tried to keep users from entering "too many" bills, but lately we're certainly trying to keep them from getting "too many" hits.
I don't know about everybody else, but I don't think this is a positive development. I want to track my bills, and I want future recipients of those bills to be able to see their travels since I sent them out. If perfectly natural hits get deleted, then future hitters don't see the tracking information, and that defeats the purpose of the site. Who cares if someone's stats are affected?--Let's track the bills!
As EJ said, the purpose of entering bills is not to get the first hit on each one; it's to get multiple hits on them and build up a real history of where a typical bill travels over time. Which would you rather find: a wild george with one previous entry, or one with two entries? If Georger X happens to spend many bills at a particular store over a period of time, and the store owner Georger Y enters them all, then so much the better: Now any future finder of those bills will see *two* previous entries instead of one, and the WG database will have a fuller record of the bill's travels. Why do we prohibit this sort of thing? I think it'd be more sensible to *encourage* it, so that non-georgers who run across our bills and enter them will be more likely to get interesting histories and come join the fun.
Note that I'm not suggesting that we falsify data. We don't want georgers passing bills back and forth just for the sake of adding entries; that would defeat the whole purpose of WG, since we wouldn't be tracking natural circulation any more. But it's just not reasonable to assume, whenever bills pass directly from one georger to another, that something other than natural circulation is going on. We need a higher threshhold of suspicion before we start throwing out hits--one which is intended primarily to weed out demonstrably false reports, not one which assumes that users are so self-interested that any significant score-boosting event is probably faked. Certainly, if the bill reports do record the actual natural travel of the bills, then hits should not be deleted.
I have nothing against friendly competition, and I like to see how my own results compare to the site average and to those of other individual georgers; the information allows me to judge how best to mark bills and such. Also, at a higher level, the stats and rankings lead to various interesting conversations about how georging conditions vary from place to place. Therefore, I'd hate to see the user stats done away with, or even placed on an opt-out basis. Rather, I think that what is needed is less emphasis on competition in the way the site is run--in particular, an explicit recognition that, yes, some georgers will happen to engage in natural transactions with other georgers, and that these georgers will therefore have unusually (but not unnaturally) high hit rates and George Scores. If the site is run in a way which makes competition obviously a secondary aspect, then the users will fall into line.
Here's an example to illustrate my point: We all know that Pino and Biagio own a restaurant and therefore can enter a *lot* of bills. Every now and then, a new user will ask whether this is somehow unfair; and we'll tell him that it doesn't really matter that some people can enter more bills than others, because WG isn't about competition anyway. I think that exactly the same reasoning should apply to a georger who happens to eat lunch at Pino and Biagio's restaurant every day: That georger should get hundreds of hits per year from P&B, and it shouldn't matter to the rest of us that some georgers can get more hits than others, because WG isn't about competition anyway. Clearly, WG does *not* currently operate that way; P&B would've been booted off the site by now if they were entering hundreds of bills from one georger. And *that* is why we have these problems with naturality-vs.-competition issues: because by prohibiting such hits, WG is implicitly stating that preserving "fair" competition is more important than tracking natural circulation.
Just my George/50 worth...but think about it, would you please? :)