It's not very wiki-like, you're right, but Wikipedia actually began
with one of the founders getting paid to write articles.
--Ryan W.
On 11/26/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There will always be subjects which are important
but where the
intersection of people who are interested, whom are willing, and whom
are able to write free content will be small.
So in parallel to finding ways to attract a wider spectrum of regular
volunteer contributors, we should also be exploring a number of other
solutions:
# Encouraging our existing volunteers to write about things they don't
care about but which we can generally agree that we ought to cover
well.
We already have some Wikipedians wanting more experts. This is the
opposite to what you propose. Writing about things that you don't care
about is not easy. Try doing such an article from scratch. You can
find a book and write about what's in there, but your lack of background
will quickly become apparent.
# We're already raising money for the
substantial operating costs of
the projects, and there have already been of grants to create for
content on non-wikipedia projects (wikibooks for example). It would be
possible for us to get some folks paid to work full time writing and
improving content where we have insufficient volunteer resources
available.
## This will require having a good picture of what we need done. The
various content projects have done a lot of work which will help us,
but I'm not sure that we have enough lined up to actually go about
hiring people to do the work.
Both of the two options classes I've proposed are both more
actionable than the vague suggestion to "bring more users of class X"
and I have more confidence that both are more likely to bring about
the desired outcome (better coverage).
So while I'm not opposed to bringing in a broader spectrum of
volunteers, I think should treat such an effort as distinct from an
effort to improve the evenness of our coverage.
Paying people to write articles would be a whole new ballgame, and
probably very un-wiki.. There would be no more effective way of
creating a class of vested interests with certain visions of how they
want the project to look. We all want better coverage, but at what cost?
Ec
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