I'm very new to this concept of paid editing. But from what I understood paid editing is allowed, as long as the editors disclose who they are paid by on their talk page or in edit summaries. I understood this to be roughly the idea of the Wikipedian in Residence title. I didn't look this up on purpose, because I wanted to point out this might be a common existing understanding. Am I mistaken? What is the policy?
As I was thinking about this, if it's true, I figured the hardest part for the community would be finding out which edit was sponsored and which was not. If the disclosure was just on the user's page, someone looking at edit histories would have to click through a lot to find possible affiliations. I'd say we could easily create an "audit" mode to the edit history that would decorate each revision based on any affiliation templates from the user pages.
But, there I go inventing a feature for a problem I don't even know exists : ) I'll just go look it up now.
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 9:19 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 February 2016 at 21:16, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Well, Sarah, after all of these years I didn't think you'd come up with anything that would surprise me. I was wrong, And I'll say that if I was going to favour paying anyone, it would be paying qualified translators
to
support smaller projects, and Wikisourcers, and people who may have the interest and ability to edit but instead have to work 60 and 70 hour
weeks
on susbsistence wages simply to feed their children. I would have an extremely difficult time justifying paying people in large, well-to-do countries to edit Wikipedia. I also strongly suspect it would kill the donation stream almost entirely once it became known that Wikipedia was
no
longer written by volunteers, but instead was written by paid editors.
(Sorry for the inadvertent early send)
Risker
24 February 2016 at 21:09, SarahSV sarahsv.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 4:20 PM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
And here I thought you were going to suggest giving each editor a pool of $$ to assign to their favorite skunkworks projects.
If we divide the current WMF budget ($58M) by the current number of monthly active editors (71K), then take 60% off the top for keeping the lights on, infrastructure, etc. -- this is a fairly typical overhead percentage for grants at universities -- we're still left with $325/editor.
As of January 2016, the English WP had 3,492 editors that the
Foundation calls "very active," but that's only 100 edits a month. [1] The core workforce is considerably smaller, and they're the ones who keep the
place
running by tidying and writing/rewriting articles, creating and maintaining various processes and policies, creating templates, and so on.
The Foundation could pay that number of workers, especially if it found imaginative ways to do it.
For example, it could set up a department that accepts contracts from individuals and groups who want certain articles to be written or rewritten. Instead of paying a PR company, those people would pay the Foundation. The Foundation would maintain a list of excellent editors
and
would offer the contract to the most appropriate, taking a percentage of the fee for itself.
The brief would specify that any article produced must adhere to the
core
content policies, so there would be no whitewashing, but there would be
an
effort to be fair. As things stand, unpaid editors have to clean up PR efforts anyway, so they might as well get paid to produce something
decent
from the start. It might only take a few ethical companies to sign up
for
the thing to take off.
Sarah
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