Justin Cormack wrote:
On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 06:25 -0800, Stan Shebs wrote:
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.
This doesnt happen. Academics and so forth are busy and expect to be paid for this type of thing. Bylines in an encyclopaedia dont cut it any more.
Unless things have changed a lot since I was in academia, there are lots of things one doesn't get paid for, such as peer review of papers. Computing Reviews didn't pay me for the paper and book reviews I wrote for them. For that matter, academics rarely get paid for publishing papers in the first place, they even pay to get them published (the "page charges").
Most likely, DU will have an (unpublicized) sliding scale, where the big names or otherwise desirable contributors can get cash, and the smaller names will have to settle for less. By buying the prestigious, they're hoping to gain instant credibility, not unlike journals hoping to increase their prestige by recruiting big names for their editorial board.
WP's best response is to continue with our program of increasing the scholarly rigor (source citation, etc), and highlight how we can do all the good things that experts do, but without being handicapped by the gamesmanship and careerism that affict the usual institutions. Sort of a return to the best traditions of pure scholarship, if you will.
Stan