Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Stevertigo wrote:
Congratulations on your sucessful and sustainable
NPO
startup. I would add that Brion isnt the only skilled
developer who gives his valuable time and skills to
WP, though.
That's absolutely true and I meant no favoritism. But it has to be
said that Brion does a lot of 'grunt work' that isn't that fun, and as
Erik put it to me the other day, the entire project would have
collapsed months ago without him.
Not to mitigate Brion's work, which is certainly very valuable, but
development work also isn't the only useful thing that goes on at
Wikipedia (as many sites seem to forget). For example, a good use of
funds (in my mind) would be to pay researchers a minimal token salary
for adding information on relatively un-fun but
need-to-be-in-an-encyclopedia topics. Currently everyone is
volunteer-only, and if I were to pick one place to start going to
"paid labor", I'm not sure it'd be the backend side of things.
I realize I forgot to fully explain my reasons I think this will become
more necessary. In addition to simply filling in boring but important
gaps (probably the best initial use, IMO), I think it will become
necessary in the future to pay some people to keep track of volatile
topics. Especially in light of the recent discussion of the possibility
of astroturfing Wikipedia, I think it would be very valuable to have a
few known-neutral-and-knowledgeable people keeping watch on certain
areas. If something like genetically modified food turns into a turf
war between, say, Monsato and environmentalists, it's likely any neutral
and knowledgeable people will want to be completely uninvolved after a
certain amount of time, while if there's at least some token payment,
perhaps it'd be easier to convince a few reliable people to devote more
attention to it.
(Note also that I'm thinking of it more as a token payment, to help
people justify their time spent on Wikipedia --- certainly nothing along
the lines of a real salary. If I had to pick a number, perhaps more in
the range of $100-$200/month.)
-Mark