[WikiEN-l] Prizes and the British Museum and Wikipedia

[Michael Peel]

On 27 Jul 2010, at 10:13, Charles Matthews wrote:

> So, [[Hoxne Hoard]] (not FA yet, might have been a contender), you'd 
> comb through well over 1000 edits, parcel out credit for substantive 
> edits, factor in photo credits, give some sort of reward for those to 
> were constructive on the Talk page, I hope, rather than plunging in with 
> additions that others had to sort out? I'm sure there would be no 
> arguments at all from people awarded £2 for work they thought was worth 
> at least £3.
> 
> The fact is that the underlying assumption was of a single-minded editor 
> who'd be motivated by a prize to put in time to create an FA pretty much 
> from scratch. Not our model of collaboration.

That is closer to the ideal collaboration than is achieved with most FAs, though. My understanding was that most FAs were either driven by a single individual, or a fairly well defined group of people - those that are actively driving the article forward until it reaches FA, rather than making smaller incremental edits or leaving constructive comments/feedback/reviewing the article. In academia, these would be the first set of author names on a paper from a big collaboration. It would be that group of people that would divide out the prize amongst them.*

In this specific case, although I contributed a number of photos for [[Hoxne Hoard]], I would not count myself as part of the collaboration that got it to FA status, and hence wouldn't have expected to share in any reward.

Mike

* It would be an interesting study to see (statistically) how many people contribute to an FA significantly, and how much work of the work is done by smaller edits (and also looking at the broader methodology and motivation behind constructing FAs). Has this been done anywhere?