It was mentioned on the recent blog post about the survey that people have asked for a leaderboard type of feature so they can see how they are progressing against every one else on the site.
Personally, I don't mind how my learning compares to other people on the site that I don't know, but I have a few friends and class mates using Skritter and I'd like to see how they are all doing and how I compare to them.
If a leaderboard is introdued, can you look at an option of creating your own tables with only the people you are interested in listed? I think that competing against people who are far in advance of me woul dbe depressing, but making sure I keep up with (or ahead of) my peers would be a much better incentive.

What do other people think?

That would be cool!

I agree.

This would be cool.

I want a generic one. The ability to sort it as you want would be good idea, but I want one against the whole site. They may still be better than I am, but I want the top dogs up there to see how much further I have to catch up.

@west316
Yes, I agree with you, comparing ourselves with others has always something to teach us.

Gilberto

I don't really compare myself against people who are more advanced in absolute terms. That is, if someone has been studying Chinese for a while and already knows 3,000 characters, they're just way beyond me. However, someone can know 3,000 characters and just maintain that level without making much progress, or they can be actively adding words and learning more. So we could still compete on the basis of characters/words learned per week, for example, or the number of days we've practiced at least X minutes without missing a day.

James

@jww1066 Competition is a completely relative term. On the one hand, a beginner has more characters that they need to learn. If we did "competitions", based on characters learned, that might encourage advanced users to spend their time learning characters that they frankly don't really need or we effectively exclude them from the contest. If we go by total numbers, then the beginner has no chance against the advanced student. The time in contests like the one they have going right now are good as far as contests with rewards go, but in terms of "competition" I just want raw data.

Top 100 characters known

Top 100 words known

Top 100 hours studied in a week

Top 100 characters learned in a week

Etc.

I just realized those examples were unclear. I meant the top 100 people for each category.

To west316's list I would add a category for the most consecutive days above 10 minutes, much like the current challenge. One for longest streak ever, and one for the longest ongoing streak on the site.

Personally I find consistent studying is the biggest factor for learning, and it is also egalitarian in regards to how many characters you already know, whether you are studying full time, etc.

+1 for all of the above :)