In T124003#1979073, @TheDJ wrote:

non public encouragement != public awards

BTW. Just thought of a possible variant to cross that achievement bridge slightly, yet still keeping close to the culture of Wikipedians.

What if we were to send OTHER (fellow) editors a notification when someone achieves something ? Inviting them to encourage the editor for instance. Will be a bit harder to implement, but might be interesting thing to explore at some point.

• You could have lot's of 'achievements'
• When reached, apply a randomness factor (to avoid predictability and reduce occurrence).
• Pick another account that recently edited (and possibly shares traits/interests, whatever with the first user)
• Ask the 2nd editor to congratulate user 1 on his talkpage (no templated response), or even at some point something smarter like: proposing how they could work together (User 1 is very active in maintaining categories as well, have you met him yet ? Maybe you could work together if you introduce yourself to him !)

Add an opt-out switch for those who don't like to be social at all of course. :)

Tasks within a system should be inclusive by default, and then a user should be able to influence the volume of something. So if you want to "increase" your volume by joining a "welcome committee", I'm fine with that, if you get annoyed, you decrease the volume by joining an opt-out group, but for diversity reasons everyone should get a 'signal' once in a while. That's healthy, even if that default group only does like 1% of the actual work, you will diversify the response and you create an easier 'funnel' towards your expert groups.

And this is not about making everything 'social', or a 'game'. It's about dosage, encouragement, checks and balances, and you cannot capture that in a binary state. We need to learn a bit about participation if we want to remain a crowd sourced platform.