[Wikipedia-l] Re: Paid adminstrator (Money.. Mark)

Mon Oct 13 04:26:42 UTC 2003

Tim Starling wrote:
> I think we should pay photographers and illustrators. It's very 
> necessary, and uncontroversial.

Rather than simply looking towards money as an inducement, we should
also be more savvy about evangelism and internal awareness for
Wikipedia.  Related to my former suggestion about a "Tell a friend"
link, here are some other brainstorming ideas, and they get more crazy
as you go further down... :)

- Universities and schools.  Encourage other schools and classes to
adopt a curricula similar to what I've done - get a bunch of students or
groups to throw their expertise into Wikipedia.  It helps the project,
and it gives folks experience in writing NPOV, editing, interacting with
others around the world, etc.  "100 ways to use Wikipedia in Teaching
and Learning" might be one way to help bring others in.

- Topics of the week.  Each week come up with 5-10 articles that
embarrasingly need work and concentrate resources on them.  (Pick some
important ones from "Most Requested Articles")  Strangers or bored
'pedians looking for something to do could always focus working on
these.  Put these on the front page, in the spotlight.

- Competition.  The Distributed.net project has many folks donating
computing time to help break certain encryption challenges, and people
could form teams to compete against each other.  We could do the same by
forming teams of folks to attack certain chunks of unfinished articles
in Wikipedia.  (This "sort of" happens now with WikiProject groups.)

- Wikipedia-thon.  Have friends pledge a certain amount of money for
each edit or article you do.  At the end of such period, more people
know what Wikipedia is, and money raised is donated to Wikimedia (but
again the Florida solicitation problem comes up).

-Fuzheado