Ray Saintonge 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.
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..
I'm not sure I see that this is necessary what will come out of paying
someone. While I do think it would be helpful to pay some authoritative
neutral people to watch over very contentious issues, this is something
I'm not very adamant about. Where I think it'd be most useful to pay
people to add content is for generally very uncontroversial stuff. For
example, we have very good information on math and computer science
topics, because that's what internet-people tend to like. We do not
have comparable information on art, history, literature, etc., and I
think paying a professor to go through and jump-start our art history
section would be a good use of funds.
-Mark