On Wed, Jan 8, 2014 at 6:22 PM, MZMcBride <[email protected]> wrote:
(Responding just on the general issue, not on the specific case.) > Paid editing is not the same as paid advocacy (editing). This is a very > important point. I agree it's an important distinction. I personally think it could be worthwhile to think about a separate non-profit organization which receives payments and manages contracts to systematically expand Wikipedia coverage, with payment entirely or largely decoupled from specific articles (at most coupled to specific domains) and the organization's policies being developed transparently in partnership with the community. I suspect such an org could receive significant grants and public support in its own right. Supporting free content isn't evil - there's stuff like http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1699256938/the-vanamo-online-game-museum which is totally awesome. It's COI and disclosure issues that raise red flags, and more significant violations of policies that sometimes go along with that. It's been suggested many times through the years that WMF should directly pay editors in some way. I don't think that's a good idea, though I would like to see more grants in support of expenses related to article writing (there are quite a few programs around that already, many of them chapter-run). *dims lights, stirs logs in fireplace* Back in the early years, I had a little statement on my userpage encouraging people to donate money to me if they liked my work and wanted me to do more on Wikipedia. (Nobody took me up on it, of course. Cheap bastards.) This was at a time when a lot of us online community nerds were thinking about donation-based funding models for communities. PayPal was just becoming a really big deal back then, because it suddenly made these early community funding experiments possible. Blender, Penny Arcade, Kuro5hin and others were among the true pioneers of what's now called crowdfunding. Axel Boldt deserves credit for this experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiMoney . I still have a WikiMoney bank balance of ψ18. Maybe I can convert it to a cryptocurrency one day. :) I'd love to see more experiments that are conducted in full awareness of the ethical issues involved, both with funding models for free content, and with other incentive structures. WikiMoney was actually quite popular for a short while, considering how much of a pain it was to actually administer! Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
