On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 16:17, Theo10011 <de10...@gmail.com> wrote: > My main point (although I *did* make it clear), was that volunteer-work is > what this movement is built on. Tell me a single content project that was > built by paid employees? If we abandon our identity, then how would we still > be volunteer-driven and open. I can argue volunteers do inherently better > work than paid staff, because they believe in what they do and are > passionate about it. It is however, just a job for most people who get paid > to do the same. You can not pay someone to care, is what my point was.
Theo, volunteers do not care about things which require to be accurate. Besides that, more and more volunteer positions were replaced by paid staff, beginning with Brion. And that's not the problem of principle, but the problem of having job done. For example, I am not interested to be paid for writing bots for Wikinews. As nobody with sufficient knowledge of Python answered on many of my calls, the product is that nobody is doing that, as I don't have enough of free time to program that bot. Although all Wikinews editions could benefit from that (there are many programmable things for a news service). I even remember that for a short period of time the bot boosted English Wikinews itself, as editors got news and just had to fix the text (quality, NPOV). Would it be better to find someone who would program that bot? The other issue is that I want to contribute to Wikinews just if I have news. In the mean time, someone has to make things to flow without problems. Who can guarantee ~50 news/day on one Wikinews edition to be almost as attractive as other news services are? News services regularly have more than 100 news per day. I agree that there are some structural problems with the rules which English Wikinews community imposed (while I understand that reviewing articles is good idea; having very high standards without relevant community is irrational), but that just catalyzed the inevitable: news service is not a news service without constant care, which could be done just by paid staff or extremely large community: 5 edits per month is not enough to be counted as Wikinews contributor if it is not at least about one new article; and 5 edits per month is usually not one article on Wikipedia. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
