[WikiEN-l] Something on the nature of working for free

[Steve Bennett]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 9:02 PM, George Herbert
<george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's important to keep in mind that volunteers - anyone you're not
> compensating for the work - do what they want, and won't do that they
> don't want to.  A lot of volunteer organizations implode when people
> at the core forget that.

Yep. The trick is to get them to want to do what you need them to do.

IMHO, Wikipedia doesn't make enough effort to set priorities and
channel work towards them.

> An excellent example of someone reaching their tolerance level on
> stuff they don't want to do for free (althought it's commercial-ish
> work on an unfunded project, rather than a purely volunteer project
> for charity):

Yeah, saw this on reddit. Not really the same though - sounds he like
he was a normal contractor understandably pissed off after not getting
paid. Don't think he ever intended to be a volunteer...