Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-5593616-20131116123402/@comment-4531192-20131119213728

The badges keep more users coming to the website, which means more clicks on advertisements, which translates to more revenue for Wikia Inc. Half thought-out, maybe, but the business comes before the product.

I like the badges because they give us something else to look at other than the typical edit count. Sure there's always going to be someone undoing and redoing the same edit on a page to get a badge, but there's also going to be someone doing the same thing to get their edit count up.