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(a)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!)