Stanley "Toshmann" Ozoemena wrote:
Please, forgive me for the diversion, but... I have to know; Should I volunteer my time, effort, et cetera... Would I ever get paid by Wikimedia for all my work? I love Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley, et al... But I gotta have an answer to this question before I take the plunge!
The real question is is not if you will ever get paid by Wikimedia (highly doubtful, even if you are doing some major administrative service like keeping track of the financial records.... this has been done by volunteers in the past), but the question is if what you are doing will be siphoned off by somebody else and will they get paid for your work?
Everybody who participates on Wikibooks at the moment are all volunteers, and to my knowledge nobody has earned a single euro or dollar from activities directly related to Wikibooks, even though there is a tentative attempt at trying to "sell" Wikibooks content in the form of printed books. If you are going to expect to get paid, it would be through these ancillary services and products, and not through any actual content development or organization work within the Wikibooks website itself. And you will not be ever receiving a paycheck from the Wikimedia Foundation, unless you directly apply for one of the very, very few staff positions that are offered directly by the Wikimedia Foundation. Nearly every one of those positions is significant support position that involves a task that simply must be done in order to keep what amounts to be a significant non-profit internet service provider up and going, and the funds necessary to keep those positions paid for is very hard earned with each position that open up is something that is reviewed very carefully not only by the WMF board, but by the community at large as well.
I would also like to point out that both Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley have a significantly diminished role in the operation of the Wikimedia Foundation currently (by their own choosing) compared to what it was even a year ago. Angela resigned her position as a board member, and Jimbo (Jimmy Wales) resigned as chairman even though he still retains a seat on the board at the moment. The current chair of the Wikimedia Foudation, Florance Devouard, has been doing a very good job under the circumstances especially as she still is in the shadow of Jimbo but trying to sustain a sort of life after Jimbo for both the Foundation as well as the Wikimedia projects.... and notable as well that Jimbo is keeping a strong "hands off" approach to the process. So to even note governance of the Wikimedia projects has been changing, and I expect it will change significantly in the future. The upcoming elections for positions within the board is going to be rather significant.
The one thing that keeps others from making money off of the volunteer work (or at least keeps it from getting out of hand) is the Gnu Free Document License (GFDL). If you have ever studied or looked at its "sister license", the GNU Public License (also General Public License or simply GPL), a multi-billion dollar a year industry has grown up around products that support mainly computer software written under the terms of that license, most notable is the computer operating system known as Linux. In the realm of general written content, the major dominant "player" is Wikipedia, followed by the various Wikimedia sister projects.
The major point about the GFDL that keeps profit making actitivity to a minimum is that there is never any "exclusive" right to republish Wikibooks content granted to any one person or company. There are companies who do make a modest income from the publication and sales of public domain literature such as Shakespearian plays or classical novels like "Moby Dick", but these are either side lines to a normal commercial publishing business or by companies who are into the crafting aspect of making outstanding quality books instead of trying to churn out the latest round of bestsellers that will be thrown away and forgotton at this time next year. If there is a business model for content like Wikibooks, it would be nearly identical to that of public domain books. Unfortunately, this also sets a very high standard in terms of the quality of the content we must have within Wikibooks in order to be taken seriously. Any company or group that starts to charge unreasonable prices for Wikibooks that are physically printed (if there is even a demand at all) will find a competitor starting up and selling the same thing but at a cheaper price.
As the Wikibooks website itself is offering the content absolutely free, and free of advertising, it seems nearly impossible that anybody is going to offer a price any cheaper unless they are going to somehow pay people to read Wikibooks content. I saw stuff this bizzare during the dot-com boom, but I don't see how that is going to apply to Wikibooks directly. There are a few companies who have tried to set up "mirrors" of Wikibooks content such as http://www.wikibooks.net/ (this used to be a nearly identical copy of the "wikibooks.org" website), but I have seen nearly all of these mirrors abandon the effort except in a few very specialized situations. And those websites are only copying a portion of Wikibooks and not the whole thing.