It should also be possible for an editor to let the payment go back to foundation. This would probably be the case for many users in industrial countries.
Perhaps it wasn't clear enough but the interface to manage translations would be for someone other than the involved translators, aka a third person within the local community, to accept the translation as valid and good enough. After it is ticked off as "done" further payment of that specific article will stop.
On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 11:27 AM, John Erling Blad jeblad@gmail.com wrote:
You guys are making the whole idea way to complex. There should be no editorial board. That goes against the whole wiki-way of doing things. There should be no additional foundation, that makes the whole idea unmanageable. It will also cost way more than the gain.
Make thing DarnSimple™! A single list covering all universally valid topics that a true encyclopedia should cover. Leave it to the translator to chose which source article to use, as this creates the best opportunity to find translators. Allow other editors to join in after publication, but do respect the primary translators effort. Split the payment in one for the initial translation, and one for the followup edits. Cap them to avoid bloated articles.
Make a DarnSimple™ interface to manage the translations, where the only action is for some identified user to tick of translated articles when they reach a certain threshold. In another interface the translator must identify himself with sufficient details to make the payment possible. This should be an optional part of the usual configuration of an account. All persons involved in the editing should have a split, but no payment will be done before the account for each editor reaches some threshold.
Make the core list big enough to create a real encyclopedia, but small enough that there are room for local additions. There should probably be some way to specify local articles, like municipalities, important authors, and politicians. A good test is whether such additional articles makes sense in neighboring countries or languages. If it isn't possible to describe such things in a generic way they should probably be left out. I'm not sure if it should be possible to exclude articles, but I guess it will be an issue for some languages. Think Armenian genocide, which is problematic for some countries.
A small single-book encyclopedia is about 60-70k articles, so lets say such a list would cover 25% of this. That would be a list of 15k articles. There are perhaps 50 Wikipedias that are large enough to be sustainable, and still small enough to miss articles on such a list. That would imply 750k articles, thus plenty of articles for those that would like to translate one! Lets say this project is spread over 10 years with a cap on each article at 2x USD 10, then it would cost about USD 1500k each year. I believe that would be manageable. (Quite frankly I doubt it would be possible to find many enough translators, so this will never reach the proposed levels!)