Proposal talk:Hire people to check the credibility of certain wikis

reach or quality?

Mixing volunteer and paid work in the same project always needs to be done sensitively, and it naturally provokes the question why should I donate my time for free when others are paid to do this. This would move us away from being a solely volunteer written project, but we already include paid writing such as the 1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica - their writers were paid and the data has now been imported as out of copyright. So the principle is acceptable though eyebrow-raising. I think that the quality of our existing websites is improving steadily through our existing volunteer base and some automation. If we were to employ a group of editors I would rather do it targeted at a particular problem area such as biographies of living people or to kickstart languages that we don't yet have critical mass in. Employing a bunch of graduates in India to translate core articles from English to Bengali, Hindi, Telagu etc would I believe be relatively cheap considering current Indian wage rates, and I think most funders and volunteers would be OK with the idea that kickstarting a new language involved employing a few translators at the beginning. To fit it into the community ethos and use it to kickstart a community rather than be an alien imposition I would suggest that the volunteers drive it by choosing and prioritising articles for translation by a process of nominating and prioritising articles they want created this way. WereSpielChequers 13:39, 6 October 2009 (UTC)