On 27 Jul 2010, at 10:13, Charles Matthews wrote:
So, [[Hoxne Hoard]] (not FA yet, might have been a
contender), you'd
comb through well over 1000 edits, parcel out credit for substantive
edits, factor in photo credits, give some sort of reward for those to
were constructive on the Talk page, I hope, rather than plunging in with
additions that others had to sort out? I'm sure there would be no
arguments at all from people awarded £2 for work they thought was worth
at least £3.
The fact is that the underlying assumption was of a single-minded editor
who'd be motivated by a prize to put in time to create an FA pretty much
from scratch. Not our model of collaboration.
That is closer to the ideal collaboration than is achieved with most FAs, though. My
understanding was that most FAs were either driven by a single individual, or a fairly
well defined group of people - those that are actively driving the article forward until
it reaches FA, rather than making smaller incremental edits or leaving constructive
comments/feedback/reviewing the article. In academia, these would be the first set of
author names on a paper from a big collaboration. It would be that group of people that
would divide out the prize amongst them.*
In this specific case, although I contributed a number of photos for [[Hoxne Hoard]], I
would not count myself as part of the collaboration that got it to FA status, and hence
wouldn't have expected to share in any reward.
Mike
* It would be an interesting study to see (statistically) how many people contribute to an
FA significantly, and how much work of the work is done by smaller edits (and also looking
at the broader methodology and motivation behind constructing FAs). Has this been done
anywhere?