On 24 February 2016 at 21:16, Risker <[email protected]> wrote: > Well, Sarah, after all of these years I didn't think you'd come up with > anything that would surprise me. I was wrong, And I'll say that if I was > going to favour paying anyone, it would be paying qualified translators to > support smaller projects, and Wikisourcers, and people who may have the > interest and ability to edit but instead have to work 60 and 70 hour weeks > on susbsistence wages simply to feed their children. I would have an > extremely difficult time justifying paying people in large, well-to-do > countries to edit Wikipedia. I also strongly suspect it would kill the > donation stream almost entirely once it became known that Wikipedia was no > longer written by volunteers, but instead was written by paid editors. >
(Sorry for the inadvertent early send) Risker > 24 February 2016 at 21:09, SarahSV <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 4:20 PM, phoebe ayers <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >> > >> > And here I thought you were going to suggest giving each editor a pool >> > of $$ to assign to their favorite skunkworks projects. >> > >> > If we divide the current WMF budget ($58M) by the current number of >> > monthly active editors (71K), then take 60% off the top for keeping >> > the lights on, infrastructure, etc. -- this is a fairly typical >> > overhead percentage for grants at universities -- we're still left >> > with $325/editor. >> > >> > As of January 2016, the English WP had 3,492 editors that the >> Foundation >> calls "very active," but that's only 100 edits a month. [1] The core >> workforce is considerably smaller, and they're the ones who keep the place >> running by tidying and writing/rewriting articles, creating and >> maintaining >> various processes and policies, creating templates, and so on. >> >> The Foundation could pay that number of workers, especially if it found >> imaginative ways to do it. >> >> For example, it could set up a department that accepts contracts from >> individuals and groups who want certain articles to be written or >> rewritten. Instead of paying a PR company, those people would pay the >> Foundation. The Foundation would maintain a list of excellent editors and >> would offer the contract to the most appropriate, taking a percentage of >> the fee for itself. >> >> The brief would specify that any article produced must adhere to the core >> content policies, so there would be no whitewashing, but there would be an >> effort to be fair. As things stand, unpaid editors have to clean up PR >> efforts anyway, so they might as well get paid to produce something decent >> from the start. It might only take a few ethical companies to sign up for >> the thing to take off. >> >> Sarah >> >> >> >> [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryEN.htm >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: >> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines >> New messages to: [email protected] >> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, >> <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe> >> > > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe>
