It's not very wiki-like, you're right, but Wikipedia actually began with one of the founders getting paid to write articles.
--Ryan W.
On 11/26/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
There will always be subjects which are important but where the intersection of people who are interested, whom are willing, and whom are able to write free content will be small.
So in parallel to finding ways to attract a wider spectrum of regular volunteer contributors, we should also be exploring a number of other solutions:
# Encouraging our existing volunteers to write about things they don't care about but which we can generally agree that we ought to cover well.
We already have some Wikipedians wanting more experts. This is the opposite to what you propose. Writing about things that you don't care about is not easy. Try doing such an article from scratch. You can find a book and write about what's in there, but your lack of background will quickly become apparent.
# We're already raising money for the substantial operating costs of the projects, and there have already been of grants to create for content on non-wikipedia projects (wikibooks for example). It would be possible for us to get some folks paid to work full time writing and improving content where we have insufficient volunteer resources available. ## This will require having a good picture of what we need done. The various content projects have done a lot of work which will help us, but I'm not sure that we have enough lined up to actually go about hiring people to do the work.
Both of the two options classes I've proposed are both more actionable than the vague suggestion to "bring more users of class X" and I have more confidence that both are more likely to bring about the desired outcome (better coverage).
So while I'm not opposed to bringing in a broader spectrum of volunteers, I think should treat such an effort as distinct from an effort to improve the evenness of our coverage.
Paying people to write articles would be a whole new ballgame, and probably very un-wiki.. There would be no more effective way of creating a class of vested interests with certain visions of how they want the project to look. We all want better coverage, but at what cost?
Ec
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