[Foundation-l] 300 Euro for excellent Articles: an experiment

Thu Aug 18 09:48:24 UTC 2005

Maybe this is the moment to introduce a thought I had some weeks ago. 
Some of us use wikipedia articles for personal websites - sometimes 
mixed with free and commercial content.

At a certain stage I myself realised that I would like to see an article 
about the region where I live in another language - this would be 
important not only for me, but for hotels in this region as well. That's 
when the idea of wikitranslations came about. Consider that when I 
translate an article for wikipedia it takes away time I could sell my 
professional services that are translations - I am not going to talk 
about my money here, but it is a general consideration.

So at a first stage I thought about me paying for having translations 
done - I would like to see Chinese, Russian, Ucrainian, Japanese etc., 
but I cannot afford to pay "normal prices" for free content translations 
as if I would do this this would mean I had to translate also much more 
myself selling and so I could not have the time to definitely contribute.

I then set up a small website - still to be finished in its idea, still 
to be completed, but I wanted it to be there to remind me on that theme: 
http://wikitranslations.com/

Then going ahead thanks to a friend I found out that on the German 
wikipedia people already did "if you do for me I will do for you", "if 
you do for me I will give you".

When talking about contents we can also think about companies that maybe 
would feature an article paying it ... why not? It is a contribution as 
well and we can get things done. And why not say: if you want this 
article to be translated you also have to give something of something 
that is important to other projects? Example: I have an article 
translated into English (and really this is not "so much needed") - in 
addition to that I pay for another article in any of the languages that 
are "important to develop" - so everyone is happy.

I also wrote some thoughts on my portal for translators - a place where 
I hope we can start to insert "we need this/that for this amount of 
money" and where direct contacts will be created ... and at a certain 
stage maybe also new contributors to the projects.

http://www.wesolveitnet.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=71&forum=34&post_id=103#forumpost103

There's still so much to consider ... like always: the day has only 24 
hours ... sigh ... anyone for a vote to triple the hours of the day???

Ciao, Sabine

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