On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 6:26 AM, Gorilla Warfare
<gorillawarfarewikipedia(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not sure I follow your logic on the grad student bit, though. Don't get
me wrong, being paid for my CA work would be great. However, paying grad
students to do the work? Unless you're specifically talking about finding
grad students who are also Wikipedians, it seems like you'll have the same
issue. Paid or not, they're still not Wikipedians. I don't think the current
issue with the CAs is that they don't have a monetary incentive to do the
work. They just aren't familiar enough with Wikipedia to know how to handle
some situations. Paying people who don't know Wikipedia will not change
this.
Last October there was a discussion of setting up a diff review queue
system, apart from the usual Mediawiki interface, which would show
people a sequence of diffs and allow them to flag potentially bad
edits for intervention. This could be used for monitoring edits to
high importance medical articles as well as keeping track of new
editors working on a project for their class. In the former case, you
might want grad students, but for monitoring new editors any
wikipedians could do such a review. Keeping medical articles accurate
is only somewhat more important than making sure classwork editors
don't further infuriate the community, but they are both high
priorities so you might want to pay something per each review task so
they don't just become another large number in WP:BACKLOG. Presumably
the existing Foundation grants process should work with that, if
someone would build the infrastructure for it. It probably wouldn't
take too lonh to adapt an existing open source RSS reader to subscribe
to the pertinent RSS feeds (such as from a "related changes" of a page
with links to the articles in question, or the contributions of the
new student users) and show them in sequence with [OK] and [Needs
intervention] buttons.
One thing we didn't discuss back then: Once the bad edits are
flagged, who does the intervention?