On Fri, Feb 26, 2016 at 12:11 PM, Pete Forsyth peteforsyth@gmail.com wrote:
However, if the core interest (as Sarah suggests) is to create paid opportunities for those who excel at Wikipedia writing and editing, those opportunities exist, and are increasingly available. The money doesn't need to flow through the WMF. In my opinion, it's much better if it doesn't; the WMF has enough political challenges to deal with, without getting involved in paid editing.
Hi Pete,
I didn't intend to start a detailed discussion about paid editing in this thread. I mentioned it only as one of the ways in which the Foundation could help unpaid editors.
To address a few issues: the point of suggesting the Foundation as a neutral broker is to remove the paid editor's COI. The editor would have no relationship with the people wanting the article, and would not be chosen by them. The brief from the Foundation would be to produce a well-written, reasonably comprehensive, neutral article about X, based on the best sources available. (Someone referred to this as advertising. It would be exactly the opposite.)
It needn't be the Foundation that organizes this. A third party might work, but the danger of a private company doing it is that they would rely on it for profit, and therefore would be sensitive to pressure from companies. The idea of the Foundation as broker is that it would always place the core policies above the desires of the client. Foundation involvement struck me as the only way for an editor to be paid for an article without having a COI.
I believe someone else suggested in this thread that it could be run the way the Education Program is, as a related but separate body. That would be something you would be perfectly placed to lead, Pete, given your experience as consultant, editor, and former Foundation employee.
Sarah