Wikipedia:Service awards

Unlike other awards given from one editor to another in a show of appreciation, this is one award that is intended to be given to yourself, although it can also be given by a third party. It is achieved by a strictly mechanical count of time registered and number of edits. Both requirements must be met to be eligible for each award level. There is no process for receiving these awards; you just determine the grade to which you are entitled, then display it on your user page.

Please remember that neither the number of edits, nor the length of time from when an account was created are, in and of themselves, good indicators of the quality of an editor's contributions or diplomatic ability. Hence, service awards do not indicate any level of authority whatsoever; "master" editors are not bestowed with more authority, through this award, than "novice" editors.

There are currently 19 award levels and one base level. The "Signator-to-Lord Gom, the Highest Togneme of the Encyclopedia" track is a humorous alternative for those who find the more formal titles too... formal.

For the first five levels, there are also incremental service awards. Unlike the Standard Unofficial Service Awards, these awards allow users to have awards in-between the major service awards. There are 20 incremental service awards, with four levels of incremental service award for each of the first five service awards.

For the sake of variety, three badge variants are provided for each level: a medal, a book, and a ribbon (thanks to ). To keep the validity and status of the major service awards, a ribbon is the only variant for incremental service awards. Editors may display the badge of their preference, a combination of badges, or none at all.

To learn your edit count and the date of your first logged edit, you can click , where this information will appear under View global account info. A more detailed edit counter is the User Analysis Tool (a replacement for X!'s edit counter); there are also other edit counters and analysis tools. These tools do not always provide equal numbers because they rely on different methods of calculation.

The following table lists the requirements for each award level. Both lengths of time and number of edits must be met for each award level.

To clarify, though, both the edit count and the time for a given level are required to achieve that level.

The edit count requirements for the levels are based on what, in the opinion of the editors who formulated the requirements, could be achieved by a human editor working with considerable regularity and diligence using the default tools and a fairly typical editing pattern. The awards for the first two years require a considerably lower edit rate than those for the later years.

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