I'm not convinced of several of the assumptions here (e.g., that the ability to break a donation down into very small percentages has been a major blocker for such efforts, i.e. that Bitcoin would be a game-changer). But it's an interesting topic.
In 2010 I wrote this summary of discussions on the German Wikipedia over two payment schemes (Flattr, a microdonation system and METIS, a disbursement system of collecting society VG Wort for authors of web pages) that have both been used for actual payments to Wikimedia contributors, albeit on a small scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-08-23/News_and_notes#German_Wikipedia_debates_payment_schemes In the dewiki community discussions back then, a large majority rejected the systematic introduction of each system, citing some of the concerns you mentioned, as well as others. On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Gilles Dubuc <[email protected]> wrote: > A random thought, maybe it's been discussed before here or on another ML, > but I couldn't find that discussion. > > I've heard the argument that a lot of people who donate money to the WMF > don't necessarily understand that contributors aren't paid to write the > content on the site, etc. and might be donating with the impression that > they're directly rewarding the people who put the content together. Because > most readers don't know how wiki projects function. Which is a reason why > the proponents of sponsored/paid editing view this as a diversion of > donations that should go to the contributors and so on. I don't have a > particularly strong opinion on this, but it's something I hear on a regular > basis from community members. > > I think there is a technological opportunity that changes the game > regarding this question, though, which is digital currencies. Bitcoin, or > whatever better shinier thing might take over its leadership position in > that domain, open opportunities with micropayments that were not possible > before. > > It's possible, right now, to build something that would allow a reader to > donate an arbitrary amount of bitcoins for a specific article ("that > article or a portion of it helped me, here's some money for the people who > wrote it"), and the sum would be broken down into lots of smaller parts, > given to all the contributors of this article. This ability to break things > down into tiny fractions is something that isn't possible with regular > money. > > I think this opens a lot of interesting questions: > - How would the breakdown be calculated? Moving content around, adding > citations, writing original content, etc. are tasks of very varied effort. > I imagine the community would probably have to define the compensation > rules here. > - What would the effects be on the community? This opens the hornet's nest > of mixing compensation and free knowledge. But in a way, the WMF is mixing > those already. > - Would it increase imbalance in article activity? It's easy to imagine > that people would flock to highly popular articles trying to update them > doing disguised null-edits just for the sake of joining the contributor > pool for future readers donating to that article. A community-driven > solution might be to decide that popular articles don't need this > compensation system and are blacklisted. This is after all most useful for > articles that require a lot of work with little reward. A whitelist > approach of putting "bounties" on areas that need work might be more > effective. > > In my opinion I think that as everything that has ever been built on this > platform, it would be just a tool and the ways the community decides to use > it might not be what we expect. It's a technical possibility that didn't > exist before, though, so I think it needs to be studied, even if nothing > ends up being done with it. > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l -- Tilman Bayer Senior Operations Analyst (Movement Communications) Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
