I really like editathons because of the ease with which they can be
designed to address systemic bias, but I'm not sure having them supported
by the Foundation is optimal from the perspective of time and money both.
Therefore, I propose that someone try some editathons where half the
tickets are auctioned, the other half are raffled, and the Foundation pays
to support them if and only if the auction fails to pay all of the expenses
in advance, and then only the difference. This will allow them to become
more exclusive, but not completely exclusive, and it will incentivize the
organizing wikipedians by allowing them to pay themselves some contingent
portion of the proceeds to be negotiated with the Foundation, and which
could, for example, include an open-ended proportion of auction proceeds.
Please share your thoughts on this proposal. I am also making diagrams for
nine of the twelve steps listed on
http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Accuracy_review
and its talk page, where I will soon be proposing a different alternate
funding model to avoid relying on Google Summer of Code. I would also be
most interested in comments on that. Thank you!