A random thought, maybe it's been discussed before here or on another ML,
but I couldn't find that discussion.
I've heard the argument that a lot of people who donate money to the WMF
don't necessarily understand that contributors aren't paid to write the
content on the site, etc. and might be donating with the impression that
they're directly rewarding the people who put the content together. Because
most readers don't know how wiki projects function. Which is a reason why
the proponents of sponsored/paid editing view this as a diversion of
donations that should go to the contributors and so on. I don't have a
particularly strong opinion on this, but it's something I hear on a regular
basis from community members.
I think there is a technological opportunity that changes the game
regarding this question, though, which is digital currencies. Bitcoin, or
whatever better shinier thing might take over its leadership position in
that domain, open opportunities with micropayments that were not possible
before.
It's possible, right now, to build something that would allow a reader to
donate an arbitrary amount of bitcoins for a specific article ("that
article or a portion of it helped me, here's some money for the people who
wrote it"), and the sum would be broken down into lots of smaller parts,
given to all the contributors of this article. This ability to break things
down into tiny fractions is something that isn't possible with regular
money.
I think this opens a lot of interesting questions:
- How would the breakdown be calculated? Moving content around, adding
citations, writing original content, etc. are tasks of very varied effort.
I imagine the community would probably have to define the compensation
rules here.
- What would the effects be on the community? This opens the hornet's nest
of mixing compensation and free knowledge. But in a way, the WMF is mixing
those already.
- Would it increase imbalance in article activity? It's easy to imagine
that people would flock to highly popular articles trying to update them
doing disguised null-edits just for the sake of joining the contributor
pool for future readers donating to that article. A community-driven
solution might be to decide that popular articles don't need this
compensation system and are blacklisted. This is after all most useful for
articles that require a lot of work with little reward. A whitelist
approach of putting "bounties" on areas that need work might be more
effective.
In my opinion I think that as everything that has ever been built on this
platform, it would be just a tool and the ways the community decides to use
it might not be what we expect. It's a technical possibility that didn't
exist before, though, so I think it needs to be studied, even if nothing
ends up being done with it.