As an editor
- I like being thanked for specific edits I made (as is currently possible via the History tab)
- I like seeing people link to Wikipedia articles I've written from other websites to help people explain things
- I like seeing people quote Wikipedia definitions that I wrote in their presentations
I think I would like it if there was some way of people to rate Wikipedia articles. If articles that I've written would get a high rating, then that would be thanks enough. Unfortunately, from the Article Feedback Tool we learned that many people will use such a voting mechanism to rate how much they like the topic of the article instead of the article itself...
As an editor I would not be very interested in getting non-specific "thank you"s, because I happened to be the person that created a stub on a topic or was the last person to revert some vandalism to an article.