--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> 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. ~S~ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)bomis.com> wrote: project And in flames too. :) ~S~ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

Delirium wrote: 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

Delirium wrote: This has got to be one of the worst suggestions that I've heard recently. Paying experts in this way would inevitably result in a two-class society. Any paid personnel to some extent implies supporting some kind of POV --- even software development. In that example, however, the overall benefit far exceeds the POV risk or damage. I'm not an absolutist who says that we should never pay anybody at anytime. Larry's full time efforts were an absolute necessity at one time for the very reasons that many people have already expressed. I do feel though that in time he outlived his usefulness. He did a lot to develop NPOV as a significant underlying principle, but like any others of us it was impossible for him to completely escape having a POV on many subjects and expressing it. What was worse was the growing number of people who were beginning to depend on a POV from Larry as a basis for their own decisions. The real problem there was the questions rather than the answers. Jimbo made a wise decision in choosing not to participate in the editing of articles; to have done differently would put him in the same position as Larry found himself. In some respects he is already facing these problems in disciplinary matters on a regular basis.. If we are to be faced with an embarassment of riches we would do well to establish financial priorities. Our first priority is already clear. Jimbo has already signalled that it would take $20,000 to bring the hardware to an acceptable. Not being a techie I have absolutely no basis to either support or oppose that estimate, but I can at least support it in principal, and I have no problem envisaging that there must also be a budget element for future contingencies in this area. Software development should be Priority #2. Obviously the hardware difficulties have been a significant factor in holding back that development, and I hope that the features that have had to be restrained will soon be back to normal function. When I was a newbie looking for things to do I made extensive use of the most wanted and other special pages; search pages were also a useful tool for tracking down possible broken or missing links. Getting these features back in operation will be a big help to the project. I agree that there are many articles that need to be written which nobody seems to do anything about. The reason behind that may simply be that people, particularly newbies, don't know what needs to be done. There may eventually be some value to paying people a modest stipend to give an underdeveloped Wikipedia a kick start by providing translations for key articles, but we don't need professors for this. Linguistic skills in the target language will be the most important. Another project which will require seed funding would be the proposal to produce the 1.0 version on CD and/or paper. Ec

Mark wrote: science Unfortunately, I think a prof. would have more important writing/publishing priorities, even with monetary inducement. However, I do support the idea of grants of some sort to encourage folks to attack certain areas. I've served on a board of a nonprofit where we give academic scholarships to students ($2,000 USD or so) and they also need to do some public service related to the field (in my case, journalism). In the case of Wikipedia, it could be that they have to contribute to at least 100 articles in their area of expertise. So just thinking outloud, one idea would be to give Wikimedia scholarships to students about to embark on graduate work in, say, biology, and tell them to beef up related Wikipedia entries, or get a student who knows Arabic to translate some to Arabic, etc. This is, of course, after we get our $50 million from Mr. and Mrs. Gates. Or, we could perhaps find some nonprofits who do give away scholarship money and see if they would point folks our way, to make Wikipedia the public service aspect of their stipulated grant/scholarship. It's always good to use OPM (other peoples' money). -Fuzheado Disclaimer: since IANAL, not sure how legal/illegal it is giving a scholarship/grant with strings attached is if you're a nonprofit.