Erik Moeller wrote:
Stan-
It occurs to me that an amusing future use of donations would be to give $1-5k grants to various notables, for the purpose of reviewing a small number of articles in their areas. Most would just do the work (or assign to a grad student) and move on, but if 1 in 10 got hooked, they could add a lot of valuable content.
The kind of people who charge $1-5k for a review usually don't have the time to "get hooked", or they already would be. It would be a total waste of money until we have a systematic internal peer review process. Many errors are so blatant that you don't need a Ph.D. to spot them. You just have to look for them. Typically, once a Wikipedia article gets above a certain length, only a minority of people working on the article has actually read the complete piece.
I think I didn't make my point well - the purpose is not really to get scholars to copyedit random articles, in fact you'd want to choose areas that are relatively clean, so they aren't spending time on obvious errors. The end goal is a sort of "targeted advertising"; getting some eyeball time from people that might tend to dismiss WP without ever having looked at it. They might not want to volunteer their own time, but having looked, they can then tell other people about WP (good and bad).
A related idea, which I've done a couple times with middling results, is simply to email the authors of references I've used in articles, and ask them to look at those articles to see if they fairly represent the work being cited. But having once been an academic, I know it can be tough to get cycles without some kind of carrot.
Stan