Gerard Meijssen wrote:
...
I categorically oppose paying people for content. Enabling them to create content is different. Citations is content and its quality is relevant but only that.
Why categorically? We already pay hundreds of people for work in support of the projects, including reader-facing administrative and content far more prominent than citations. We encourage Wikipedian in Residence programs where third parties pay for all kinds of content development. The PR editing guidelines explicitly recognize that paid content happens anyway, we can't control it, but we can offer best practices. We support editing assigned as part of academic class requirements.
What reason is there to flatly rule out paying people to find citations before measuring the quality and cost/benefit ratio of doing so with a variety of both incentive payment models and managers?
How do people feel about a few of the larger the Chapters funding
pilots to
have professional researchers do https://tools.wmflabs.org/citationhunt/en
and a few other main languages?
It would be great to measure the quality of results of different payment incentive models and rates, but this is not something that the Foundation could do without some risk of breaching the DMCA safe harbor provisions,
as
far as I can see. Even if I am technically wrong about that, the appearances would be that it's obvious exertion of what would be positive editorial control, which would still mean a greater likelihood of
lawsuits
by disgruntled BLP and corporate subjects who can't win in court but can waste everyone's money.
But I would rather have multiple measurements administered by different parties anyway, because there are likely to be large uncontrollable
sources
of noise.