geni wrote:
On 1/8/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
I think the consensus was, "It'll be humorous and perhaps a little sad to see how little they end up with after blowing $10 million," or maybe that was just my opinion on it.
FF
oh I don't know. They could currently afford to spend $11.02 per wikipedia article.
Which for the average expert is going to mean 5-10 minutes per article, only enough time for the most minimal fact-checking, let alone making it a "featured article". Even if you pinch down and say that a good reference needs only 100K articles, you're still only getting an hour or so on each.
Reading between the lines, I think what they're really hoping is to leverage the $10M for infrastructure, with most expert content creators being "paid" in the form of bylines. For many experts, this will be sufficient draw; they will be able to justify it as part of work, it will be a way to get ahead, etc. DU is also going to be able to advertise itself as a cretin-free zone, which starts to look pretty good after an hour of RC patrol here.
The most concerning aspect for us is the potential to drain away activity in science and technical areas, leaving WP to evolve into the "free encyclopedia of garage bands and manga trivia". (You laugh, but consider vandals gradually blanking math articles that are not on any active editor's watchlist, and not noticed in RC because of the continuous flood of recategorization edits.)
Stan