[Foundation-l] 300 Euro for excellent Articles: an experiment

Thu Aug 18 14:49:43 UTC 2005

Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> When an article from the German Wikipedia is translated for 
> money by a professional translator, in what way would this 
> article be of less quality or of a lesser reputation than the 
> orignial article in German?

I agree. On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.  And
when I translate an article, nobody knows if I'm paid or not.

> There have been organisations that threatened to come to 
> Wikipedia in numbers.. This was met with efficient dispatch when 
> they started to praise their wares or sing their message.

I predict that this is a passing phase.  There are now many 
skilled wikipedians who know how to follow NPOV and all policies.  
Some of these will be short on money and tempted to get hired by 
public relations firms to place "messages" in Wikipedia.

For example, suppose that I were hired by the Swedish tourist 
board to promote Sweden as an exotic tourist destination.  I would 
spend time to update and improve articles on places and things 
Swedish on the Swedish, Danish, English, and German Wikipedias.  
I could then go on to write interesting background articles on the 
German Wikipedia about the TV series Inga Lindström.  In fact, 
this activity would be impossible to distinguish from what I now 
do without pay.  (I'm probably an idiot who does this without 
compensation.)

The bias would be that I only write articles on Sweden and none 
about Norway or other countries.  Nobody can blame me for that.

Traditional encyclopedias (supposedly) have editorial policies to 
balance the coverage of different topics and countries, but that 
is missing in Wikipedia (for a good reason: Wikipedia has no size 
limit that requires such limitations).

> I do not think payed translations and payed content can be 
> rejected by the community because there is nothing in our 
> charter that says that good information cannot be payed for.

I agree.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se