[Wikipedia-l] Money, money...

Mon Oct 13 12:34:12 UTC 2003

Delirium wrote:
> How is the notion of paying academics for their knowledge more 
> anti-wiki than the notion of paying coders for their skills?

Speaking only for myself, and others may have a different perspective,
I agree with you.  But there are tasks that are not like writing
articles or coding.

Jason works for me.  When he drives to the colocation facility in San
Diego, and works all day on hardware upgrades, spending the night if
necessary, he gets paid to do that.  I wouldn't expect people to
really volunteer for that duty, and it is *especially* hard to imagine
people volunteering to do that and doing it "on demand".

Jason didn't have to "take off work" today to drive to San Diego to
help us out, because helping us out *is* his work.  It's free to
Wikipedia, of course, because I pay for it, but someday in the distant
future it is possible that I will ask Wikipedia to self-fund in one
way or another.

It has often been proposed, and I have repeated it myself sometimes,
that we need to hire a database guru to study our software and find
ways to optimize our database.  Well, even though many people have
said that and even though I have repeated it, I'm actually very
skeptical that it's necessary?

Are we telling ourselves that in the entire universe of free software,
with thousands and thousands of top-level experts available, we can't
find a handful of people from Debian or the mysql development team or
whatever to come and do this for us?  That's hard to imagine?

And I actually have concerns that some buzz about hiring people might
actually *inhibit* them from volunteering.  It's only natural -- if
someone might hire me for $X for Y hours of work, I might not be as
inclined to spend my spare nights and weekends doing the same thing
for free.

--Jimbo