[Wikipedia-l] $6,000 goal reached!

Sun Oct 12 05:05:39 UTC 2003

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