On Feb 15, 2005, at 9:13 AM, Tony Sidaway wrote:
NSK said:
Have you ever wondered why I rarely edit at Wikipedia? it's because I know that nobody will know that an article or paragraph was written by me.
Good grief, is that what it's all about?
In my course of recruiting for wikipedia, this is a statement made by several academics. The nature of wikipedia as a "people's encyclopedia" stops them.
Now this is a serious question - people will work for free but not for nothing - and part of what will help wikipedia grow is finding ways of giving people the ability to get "something" for their work, particularly in the writing community, that is the body of editors who make large contributions. Right now we hand out the ability to POV push - which is why we are codependent on poves. Another ability which we are about to hand out is the ability to google bomb by pushing your favorite sites in links. Fights over these issues are among the most personal and stress inducing in wikipedia. It would be better if we could "pay" people in some other form, to induce more contributors of the kind who write good NPOV articles. We have a currency for people who can negotiate compromise - administrator status - but not for people who can create articles.
Where I disagree with NSK is that the required inducement is handing out "ownership", simply because the experience of wikibooks - namely that it isn't growing quickly - shows that "credit" is only worth something when it is attached to something else, like money. Handing out ownership stops other editors from working on something, which means that the economics moves back to "what a single editor can produce". At which point he might as well produce for money. Article ownership is the wrong currency to hand out.
However, "credit" of other kinds could given, one which did not attach "ownership" to a particular article. Wikipedia should look into ways to recognize its creative contributors, without attaching personal credit or ownership over articles.