On 05/09/07, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
Some of the criticisms are more intelligent, though; they accept the validity of working for free (as they point out, pro bono work has been done by professionals forever), but they are down on contests; the point being all the wasted effort. It's one thing to work for free if your work is going to be used, it's another to work for free for your work to be thrown out.
Personally I think the amount of crap that a designer would have to take from fractious Wikipedians deserves pay. No matter what changes get proposed, someone loud is going to hate it.
Worse than that. They stress the importance of working with the customer. The problem is that in this case in order to get reasonable results the customer would have to be the community which looks ok until you realise to get a simple question answered will take months and the answer will be long messy and written in the kind of language that a political spin doctor would probably think of as going to far.