[Foundation-l] Rewarding volunteers

[Erik Moeller]

John-
> simple vision: a free encyclopedia where anyone could edit anything.
> Now, sysops, developers etc are getting more power,

That happened when?

Sysops have no irreversible powers and are accountable to their own peers  
as well as the entire community. On the English Wikipedia, there is a  
ridiculously complex procedure for dealing with obvious problem users,  
which in most cases never amounts to anything. Trolls and morons violate  
policies with impunity on a regular basis. Just check the history of any
controversial article on Wikipedia.

Developer "powers" were actually recently reduced by creating a new class  
of privileged users trusted by the community, stewards. Developers have   
no privileges when it comes to policy decisions over normal users.

Important policy decisions have been increasingly *democratized* in the  
last few months, and a board was elected in order to replace the previous  
benevolent dictator model. Before that, there even was a time when  
Wikipedia had an Editor in Chief who quite aggressively pursued a singular  
vision of building the project.

So, given that the trend is the exact opposite of what you claim it is, I  
can either deduce that you know nothing about Wikimedia's history, or that  
you are living in a parallel universe superimposed over own where time  
runs in the opposite direction. Which is it?

> anons less trusted,

Anons were *never* trusted, and for good reason. Trust is based on  
experience, and you cannot build experiences with someone you don't know.  
Even so, using technological improvements like templates, people send  
polite messages to even vandals and spammers before they are blocked:

     Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has
     now been removed. Please use Wikipedia:Sandbox for any other tests
     you want to do, since testing material in articles will normally
     be removed quickly. Please see the welcome page if you would like
     to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.

We have an almost masochistic relationship to abusers, we tolerate them  
until it starts to bleed. For every deletion, there is a debate, and when  
the debate becomes long, that usually means the content isn't deleted (no  
consensus!). We tolerate the crappiest articles you can imagine about the  
most insignificant fictional character in a minor video game franchise. If  
you suggested publicly that as a project with 1,000,000 articles we no  
longer need to allow people to edit who are not even willing to go through  
a 15-second-registration-process, the resulting outcry in the wikisphere  
would cause major floods and earthquakes.

> and there is talk of paying developers.

Yes, we are actually thinking about running a trial to get certain  
features *which users ask for* or *which the Wikimedia Foundation and its  
democratically elected Board of Trustees deem useful* implemented. We  
might use money donated for that purpose to promote the development of  
open source software. We might give people who cannot directly contribute  
to software development the *choice* to contribute to the progress of the  
software by other means - the horror!

Of all the online projects I've ever been involved in, Wikimedia is the  
most paranoid about power and money. I prefer facts to paranoia, and  
progress to stagnancy.

Regards,

Erik