[Foundation-l] An urgent Proposal: A fair, effective and free rewarding system for WikiPedia volunteers

[Kiss All]

Dear all,

This idea appeared in my mind when I was in bathroom this morning .
And hope I am using the right words and sentences to express my idea
because English is not my mother tongue. :-)

Proposal: 

* We ***MUST*** find fair,effective, and free ways to reward, either
spiritually or financially, those volunteers who are diligently,
consistently creating and editing high-quality articles in wikipedia
site family.

* And We also **MUST** extend this reward method to any person who
directly or indirectly contributed or are contributing to wikipeida
site family by any means.

== Do we really need this? Absolutely! ==

By fairly and effectively rewarding those page creating and editing
volunteers, we can encourage and enable current volunteers to do even
better work and attract more new voluteers to participate in this
magnificent, world-wide cooperation
which will definitely benefit to our planet in the future . 

Actually, a positive feedback cycle could be established in this way
and WikiPedia would have a model to grow rapidly and healthily:

volunteers write/edit good articles--> more people are willing to read
them, find they are useful and reward the volunteers  --> volunteers
get rewarding, either spiritually or financially -->voluteers are
encouraged and be able to write more good  articles --> ...


I am not treating volunteers as experimental white mice here(Remeber I
am one of them). But this cycle simply works! Doesn't it? Of course,
there are some people don't need any kind of reward to do excellent
work, just let them be and provide an option to turn off the rewarding
faucet to them :-)


== Mission Impossible? Fair, Effective, and Free? ==

=== How to be Fair? ===
*let all readers/visiters have an equally chance to participate in
grading any volunteer and any article (or even any section) in terms
of quality and quantiy.

* A convenient way for readers to grade current article or section. 

* A convenient way for readers to grade each volunteer

* Or we can just focus the quality of the article, let computer derive
the grading of the volunteers from the articles ? No, I don't like
this way. Computers are not smart enough to identify real work or junk
work currently. And somebody could abuse it if he/she knows the
deriving algorithms.

===How to be Effective?===
Simply and easy: Give them Fame! && Give them money!

Needless to say, all volunteers deserve fame and money via their excellent work.
Again turn off the rewarding faucet to people who don't want those two :-)

==== Fame ====
* Showing their names (even nicknames work well enough for encouraging
purpose)explicitly under the title of each article(or even each
section if it is peice of enough work), sorted by grading numbers
provided by readers/visiters which can be used to identify the quality
and quantity of their work

* Better organization of the contribution information for individual
volunteers. I don't want talk too much about it this time, but the
current page for this is a mess.

* A centralized monument(a php page actually) carved in the important
names and their pictures(if they don't mind) who contributed a lot to
wikipedia in history (though it is a short history)

* A centralized room to showing current star volunteers with highest
grading number along with their pictures if they don't mind.

==== Money ====
* Let readers/visitors have changes to directly donate money
flawlessly(1 cent, 1 dollar or one house if they really want) to the
volunteers at their own will.

* Or let them donate all to WikiPedia and let WikiPida distribute
them? NO!NO!NO! Some bureaucrats could abuse their power and ruin the
whole direct and fair reward mechanism. We already have the option for
visitors to donate to WikiMedia
Foundation directly.Don't mess them up.

===How to be free? ===
It is actually care-free enough for WikiPedia Site family if we use
the methods I mentioned above.


===Is it feasible? ===
I cannot see any technical obstacles to prevent us from realizing this
grading-rewarding system. However, we need consult experts for the
non-technical issues, I am not a lawyer.

And more over, it is not a new idea at all. I saw something similar
happening in sourceforge.net.

== Its impact on the future==
Finally, what is the impact of this open, direct,and discrete
working-rewarding model on our world in the future?

I would say: A revolution has began! Why? This model can facilitate
people to do what they really have interested in while get the reward
they deserve if their interests can actually benefit a large group of
people in some way. The direct feature of this model also eliminates
most of the intermediate costs or overhead which is not unusual in
current world.

By contrast, traditionally, we have to be employeed by some
organizations for a relatively longer time to contribute our wisdom,
knowledge, and efforts to end-users indirectly. However, our interests
are usually changing and sometimes we are
feeling be forced to do something we no longer like to do. The worse
thing is that the reward from the end-user are so indirect that
sometimes the people between us and the users grab a large portion
from it in an amount of we think they do not
deserve. The result is quite obvious: we get really frustrated and
therefore work ineffectively.

Hey! I am not saying this model can completely phase off the
traditional work model. The people between the workers and users  are
indeed necessary for many big products, the presure imposed by
employers serves as stimulant for us to secrete more adrenalin to
become more powerful and energic than usual, and there is no detour to
gain real achievement without loyal to your original faith and
interest.

What I am really going to emphasize is that some real requirements in
our world can be fulfilled better in simpler, directer, and even
discrete way. And, We already have paid enough attention to the free
spirit of software sharing,knowlege sharing and so on and so forth. It
is time for us to see another  unadulterated side of this coin: the
sharing is also joyfull, profitable, and thus sustainable and
scalable.

In conclusion, please seriously consider my above proposal and the
meaning behind it.  Let's put it in roll as soon as possible! I bet it
will make a big difference to wikipedia site family, the whole free
resource community(no matter it is a
idea, a software, a valuable experience,an encyclopedia article, a
piece of knowledge or anything else useful to our world), and most
important, it may make a big difference to you, my lovely, respectable
friends combating in this money? world for the noble ideal of sharing
knowlege among the world for free.

I am also puting this initial, unmature proposal into page 

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/A_Fair%2C_Effective_and_Free_Rewarding_System_for_WikiPedia_Volunteers

Please refine it (English is a pain for me) and add your ideas or
comments if you are interested.

I am waiting for your response......

Best Regards,

kissall

-- 
Be good....