On 11/26/06, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
# Encouraging our existing volunteers to write about things they don't care about but which we can generally agree that we ought to cover well. ## Admittedly, we already do this to an extent but there is certainly more we can do.
Not really. Most wikipedia volunteers are here to write about the stuff they are interested in. They are not interested in major work beyond that. Sometimes the boarders can be bent (so you are interested in wars? How about the wars of Africa?). Sometimes they cannot be.
Further problems is that sometimes you need particular bits of knowledge to write about things. Hard to write much about say Mauritania without being able to read Arabic and french (which is a pity because the results of the last elections came out on Thursday and [[Politics of Mauritania]] need uprating).
# We're already raising money for the substantial operating costs of the projects, and there have already been of grants to create for content on non-wikipedia projects (wikibooks for example). It would be possible for us to get some folks paid to work full time writing and improving content where we have insufficient volunteer resources available. ## This will require having a good picture of what we need done. The various content projects have done a lot of work which will help us, but I'm not sure that we have enough lined up to actually go about hiring people to do the work.
Working with people paid to edit is going to be problematical since you would likely have to pay them to do more than write.