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

Sun Oct 12 07:16:44 UTC 2003

Daniel Mayer wrote:

>Delirium wrote:
>  
>
>>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. 
>>    
>>
>
>With a large enough grant we could hire college professors part time to 
>contribute to selected topics. Yes, that would be neat. 
>
>One thing I would love to see happen would be a college (or even high school 
>for that matter) Latin instructor work with his or her students on creating a 
>whole bunch of Latin articles. Heck, he or she could also work on a Latin 
>textbook too!  
>
>We could have year long contracts and move from language to language among the 
>smaller Wikipedias. /That/ would majorly kick-start many language Wikipedias 
>that might otherwise languish for years. I'm a firm believer that one of the 
>major reasons why Wikipedia took off was due to the fact that Larry Sanger 
>was a full time paid editor of Wikipedia during its first year. 
>
>A webpage designer and usability experts could also be hired to revamp our 
>user interface. With enough money we could get a lot of the less-than-fun 
>stuff done that would otherwise take a long time relying only on volunteers. 
>  
>
I agree with all these ideas---another way of getting funding for 
content that pops to mind would be encouraging others to make these 
sorts of payments, either in addition to or instead of donating to us 
directly.  It's already fairly commonplace for grants to be written to 
fund development of open-source software (so far the US government is 
the biggest spender here, but there are a few others), so perhaps we 
could get people to give money for the purpose of contributing to an 
open-content Wikipedia.

I could see, among many other examples, a [Greek/Polish/Italian/etc.] 
cultural heritage organization being willing to give a grant to a 
professor for contributing to the [xx] culture and history section of 
the English Wikipedia, or just in general to the [xx]-language 
Wikipedia, as such an endeavor would fit perfectly with their mission of 
spreading awareness of [xx] culture---whereas simply donating cash to 
Wikipedia would be harder to justify within their charter.  Of course, 
NPOV will be an issue (we don't want a fiercly nationalistic Greek or 
Turk writing the history of that conflict, for example), but we deal 
with those already, and I think such grants could have lots of benefits.

-Mark