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