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.