Being active on a smaller community I am rather surprised of this
discussion, which I believe is a privilege that only the biggest version
can have. Being on a small, we are positive to any editing that improves
the value and quality. As long it being done within the framework
WMSE actively encourage our old heritage instituion to let their
employees write articles on runestones etc as part of their paid
employment. The community is very positive to the publishing companies
who write excellent articles on the authors they publish books from. We
accept that most articles of organizations and companies are written by
persons employed by these. Here we have to work with them to get the
fluff and promotion out of the articles, but see this as part of getting
valuable content
We are now also looking into how to get most value of the new techniques
being introduced, Wikidata, Wikimaps, new mediawiki sw. And here we find
that we probably have to build up "platforms" of software (templates,
modules, bots etc) for different subject areas (like geographic entities
in Sweden, painting etc). And again being a small community, it is
quite possible we find we can not develop these technical complicated
software without help of paid employees, we are just too few volunteers
with top technical expertise competence
Anders
Dariusz Jemielniak skrev 2014-01-09 09:22:
I totally agree with MZMcBride and Erik. It also depends and what the money
go for. If somebody is paid to bend the rules or use their privileged role,
it is an obvious problem. If somebody is paid a compensation for the costs
incurred in collecting materials (as sometimes is the case with scanners,
photos, etc.), it obviously isn't. And the area between is grey and
undefined.
As you possibly know, I believe that outright forbidding all paid editing
results in a situation when people still do it, but in secrecy. This is not
good for us, as it increases the amount of work needed to eradicate such
edits.
I think that we should allow paid edits under certain conditions (although
obviously not allow paid advocacy), when all encyclopedic standards are
fulfilled, but require full transparency and disclosure, to allow better
tracking and evaluation of such edits. I also believe that transparency and
disclosure of even potential COI is crucial (and unfortunately impossible
under current rules).
best,
dariusz "pundit"
On Thu, Jan 9, 2014 at 8:57 AM, Erik Moeller <[email protected]> wrote:
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
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