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

Mon Oct 13 06:53:47 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:

> 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.

> 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. Having them be the ones to intervene in POV disputes would be 
> disastrous.

This has got to be one of the worst suggestions that I've heard 
recently.  Paying experts in this way would inevitably result in a 
two-class society.  Any paid personnel to some extent implies supporting 
some kind of POV --- even software development.  In that example, 
however, the overall benefit far exceeds the POV risk or damage.

I'm not an absolutist who says that we should never pay anybody at 
anytime.  Larry's full time efforts were an absolute necessity at one 
time for the very reasons that many people have already expressed.  I do 
feel though that in time he outlived his usefulness.  He did a lot to 
develop NPOV as a significant underlying principle, but like any others 
of us it was impossible for him to completely escape having a POV on 
many subjects and expressing it.  What was worse was the growing number 
of people who were beginning to depend on a POV from Larry as a basis 
for their own decisions.  The real problem there was the questions 
rather than the answers.  Jimbo made a wise decision in choosing not to 
participate in the editing of articles; to have done differently would 
put him in the same position as Larry found himself.  In some respects 
he is already facing these problems in disciplinary matters on a regular 
basis..

If we are to be faced with an embarassment of riches we would do well to 
establish financial priorities.  Our first priority is already clear. 
 Jimbo has already signalled that it would take $20,000 to bring the 
hardware to an acceptable.  Not being a techie I have absolutely no 
basis to either support or oppose that estimate, but I can at least 
support it in principal, and I have no problem envisaging that there 
must also be a budget element for future contingencies in this area.

Software development should be Priority #2.  Obviously the hardware 
difficulties have been a significant factor in holding back that 
development, and I hope that the features that have had to be restrained 
will soon be back to normal function.   When I was a newbie looking for 
things to do I made extensive use of the most wanted and other special 
pages; search pages were also a useful tool for tracking down possible 
broken or missing links.  Getting these features back in operation will 
be a big help to the project.  I agree that there are many articles that 
need to be written which nobody seems to do anything about.  The reason 
behind that may simply be that people, particularly newbies, don't know 
what needs to be done.

There may eventually be some value to paying people a modest stipend to 
give an underdeveloped Wikipedia a kick start by providing translations 
for key articles, but we don't need professors for this.  Linguistic 
skills in the target language will be the most important.

Another project which will require seed funding would be the proposal to 
produce the 1.0 version on CD and/or paper.

Ec