Based on the limited information that I have, it seems to me that there are
already numerous contribtors who are paid to engage in promotional activity on
Wikipedia, whether declared or undeclared, and the community does not have
adequate human resources to patrol and investigate all of these. I expect that
the problem will continue to get worse unless WMF gets more energetic about
investigating TOS violations involving undeclared COI and WMF becomes
predictable about extracting financial penalties that are severe enough to
deter most of the undeclared COI contributors. Unfortunately, as far as I know,
WMF has been largely passive about the problem of undeclared COI and has not
announced any plans to become more aggressive.
As nice as it would be if everyone could afford and was willing to work for
free, this is not the case. If it was then we could safely eliminate the
salaries of the entire WMF staff. However, I think that financial support makes
sense for some paid staff to handle activities like network operations,
interface design, legal defense, and responses to safety problems.
Some types of Wikimedia activities are better suited to volunteer work than
others. I encourage volunteers to avoid burning themselves out; there are some
activities that I did in the past that I would not do again as a volunteer.
Better to be an occasional and long-term contributor than to get burned out.
I have some ideas about how to pay people to do certain types of work that, so
far, WMF has not funded. Unfortunately these are merely ideas and not likely to
become reality in the short term. Perhaps later this year or in the next few
years I will have specific proposals with reasonable chances for sustainable
success.
I share the concern that paid participants in the Wikiverse, like staff of WMF
and affiliates, WMF grantees, and potentially like the paid contributors that I
have in mind, may become so numerous that they can drown out the consensus of
the volunteers. Unfortunately I do not have easy solutions for this issue. We
could prohibit all paid contributors from participating in RFCs and related
decision processes, but we would be largely relying on people to self-disclose
their paid status, which seems unlikely to be adequate.
Perhaps the issues that we are discussing in this conversation should be
included in the Structures and Systems prong of the WMF strategy process. I am
pinging Nicole to ask for her input about that idea. However, keep in mind that
the strategy process is financially sponsored by WMF, and it is not free of
potential conflicts with the interests of WMF.
I wish that I could be more optimistic. These are difficult topics.
Regards,
Pine
( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
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