On Wed, Feb 24, 2016 at 4:20 PM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.w...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > And here I thought you were going to suggest giving each editor a pool > of $$ to assign to their favorite skunkworks projects. > > If we divide the current WMF budget ($58M) by the current number of > monthly active editors (71K), then take 60% off the top for keeping > the lights on, infrastructure, etc. -- this is a fairly typical > overhead percentage for grants at universities -- we're still left > with $325/editor. > > As of January 2016, the English WP had 3,492 editors that the Foundation calls "very active," but that's only 100 edits a month. [1] The core workforce is considerably smaller, and they're the ones who keep the place running by tidying and writing/rewriting articles, creating and maintaining various processes and policies, creating templates, and so on. The Foundation could pay that number of workers, especially if it found imaginative ways to do it. For example, it could set up a department that accepts contracts from individuals and groups who want certain articles to be written or rewritten. Instead of paying a PR company, those people would pay the Foundation. The Foundation would maintain a list of excellent editors and would offer the contract to the most appropriate, taking a percentage of the fee for itself. The brief would specify that any article produced must adhere to the core content policies, so there would be no whitewashing, but there would be an effort to be fair. As things stand, unpaid editors have to clean up PR efforts anyway, so they might as well get paid to produce something decent from the start. It might only take a few ethical companies to sign up for the thing to take off. Sarah [1] https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/SummaryEN.htm _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
