I'm not convinced of several of the assumptions here (e.g., that the ability to break a donation down into very small percentages has been a major blocker for such efforts, i.e. that Bitcoin would be a game-changer). But it's an interesting topic.

In 2010 I wrote this summary of discussions on the German Wikipedia over two payment schemes (Flattr, a microdonation system and METIS, a disbursement system of collecting society VG Wort for authors of web pages) that have both been used for actual payments to Wikimedia contributors, albeit on a small scale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-08-23/News_a...

In the dewiki community discussions back then, a large majority rejected the systematic introduction of each system, citing some of the concerns you mentioned, as well as others.

On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:

A random thought, maybe it's been discussed before here or on another ML, but I couldn't find that discussion.

I've heard the argument that a lot of people who donate money to the WMF don't necessarily understand that contributors aren't paid to write the content on the site, etc. and might be donating with the impression that they're directly rewarding the people who put the content together. Because most readers don't know how wiki projects function. Which is a reason why the proponents of sponsored/paid editing view this as a diversion of donations that should go to the contributors and so on. I don't have a particularly strong opinion on this, but it's something I hear on a regular basis from community members.

I think there is a technological opportunity that changes the game regarding this question, though, which is digital currencies. Bitcoin, or whatever better shinier thing might take over its leadership position in that domain, open opportunities with micropayments that were not possible before.

It's possible, right now, to build something that would allow a reader to donate an arbitrary amount of bitcoins for a specific article ("that article or a portion of it helped me, here's some money for the people who wrote it"), and the sum would be broken down into lots of smaller parts, given to all the contributors of this article. This ability to break things down into tiny fractions is something that isn't possible with regular money.

I think this opens a lot of interesting questions:

• How would the breakdown be calculated? Moving content around, adding

citations, writing original content, etc. are tasks of very varied effort. I imagine the community would probably have to define the compensation rules here.

• What would the effects be on the community? This opens the hornet's nest

of mixing compensation and free knowledge. But in a way, the WMF is mixing those already.

• Would it increase imbalance in article activity? It's easy to imagine

that people would flock to highly popular articles trying to update them doing disguised null-edits just for the sake of joining the contributor pool for future readers donating to that article. A community-driven solution might be to decide that popular articles don't need this compensation system and are blacklisted. This is after all most useful for articles that require a lot of work with little reward. A whitelist approach of putting "bounties" on areas that need work might be more effective.

In my opinion I think that as everything that has ever been built on this platform, it would be just a tool and the ways the community decides to use it might not be what we expect. It's a technical possibility that didn't exist before, though, so I think it needs to be studied, even if nothing ends up being done with it. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l