Let contributors receive voluntary donations for their work

Work based on personal rewards (money) typically generates even more anti-social behavior, as advised by Quality Control guru en:W. Edwards Deming. Any pay-for-text scheme would need to be limited to large groups; otherwise, it would be like the Golden-Editor-of-the-Year award:

• "Your edits to this article are ruining my chances to win The Award", plus
• "Your edits to this article are lowering my click-to-pay totals".

Even worse, numerous systems have reported internal "poisoning of wells". Imagine a group of new editors come to some valuable articles and start making repeated-tiny-hacks to lower quality (those suspicious new editors couldn't be meat-puppets, could they?). Suddenly, the great User:WriteForMoney, like a miracle, is able to untangle all the hacked articles at the last minute, and quickly update them to current data, when other editors were always thwarted by those pesky newcomers who made the articles slightly worse, day after day. "Oh, Great User:WriteForMoney, we reward you $1,000 for fixing those articles and making those pesky people leave." Numerous other examples abound, where the Top-customer-helper got a big cash bonus, for being the hero, to solve so many unusual problems which mysteriously occurred recently (typically when other employees were not around). No matter, because the hero was well paid for fixing those hideous problems which he was able to pinpoint so quickly - an amazing performance: it was almost like God told him exactly where each problem was hidden(!). Hence, do not allow that; any reward systems should be focused on several large groups, where each group receives some resonable portion of the similar reward, such as: 29%, 26%, 24%, 21% (not 97% to three at 1%). -Wikid77 20:09, 18 March 2011 (UTC)

A possible solution would be to set up another wiki, call it Wiki-paid-ya, which works just like Wikipedia except it has Google AdSense enabled, with revenues distributed to contributors who opt-in to be paid. The licensing would be compatible with Wikipedia, with the aim of mirroring all the content to Wikipedia, after it has been up long enough on Wiki-paid-ya for Google to recognize it as original there. If enough people are interested in reading the content on Wiki-paid-ya, they will generate AdSense revenue to compensate the contributors there. The content will still be available on Wikipedia (after a delay of a few days or weeks), and won't create any problems with advertising on Wikipedia. All the potential problems from advertising should remain isolated on Wiki-paid-ya.

This would have the added advantage of keeping all contributions beyond the reach of Wikipedia's deletionists. They could delete the content from Wikipedia but not from Wiki-paid-ya where it appeared originally.

The drawbacks would of course be all the usual drawbacks of starting up a new wiki - porting a kazillion templates and help files, attracting a critical mass of contributors, etc. There would be the additional problem of dividing up the AdSense revenue. (If we think there are editing disputes on a free site, try throwing money into the shark pool.) However, I suspect a lot of people who want to contribute content to Wikipedia, to be distributed freely and edited mercilessly, wouldn't mind putting their work first on a site where they could get paid for some of the views.