Hiring editors

Hi Eekim,

I fully agree with you. With the voluntary organizations one must be careful with the hiring people. It is also possible, that when the voluntary organizations is primary operating online -- like Wikimedia -- one must be even more careful. This is anyway a pretty unique territory for any organization.

Anyway, I think a good way to think about the difference between "volunteers" and "paid staff" is to think the Red Cross model. When the Red Cross volunteers are giving blood (and money), taking part in the first-aid training (and helping someone when there is a car accident) the paid staff members of the Red Cross go when there is a humanitarian disaster. They both share the same mission and also value each other contribution.

The volunteers in a way work for the Organization when they have time (like me now on my vacation) whereas the paid staff are there to do the job when I do not have time.

I assume the mission of the foundation is widely accepted among the volunteers / the community. If this is the case then having some one working for money to reach it shouldn't be a problem to anyone. I as a volunteer can not contribute to the Hindi Wikipedia so, if my little monetary contribution can help to make the Hindi Wikipedia to grow I do not have anything against it.

However, like you wrote it is possible that the marketing, community development etc. is a more fair and cost-efficient method to build the editor community. Still, I assume the hired marketing / community development people should come from the existing editor community.

There has been some discussion in the local language projects task force about whether there is a good idea to hire proffessionals, or give volunteers the chance to make some money from translation of the MediaWiki software messages. It has been estimated that there would take around 9,000 hours to translate all messages into all languages with more than one million native speakers. Organized localization of the software is done at translatewiki.net right now where most of the work is voluntary. But twice a year there has been bounty rallies, where translators that completes 500 translations within some time frame has been given a share of €10,000. The problem that has been discussed is whether the volunteer comunity will disappear if others get payed for the same work.

I think that, as Teemu says, if the goals the hired personal tries to achive is in line with the communities goals and the goals proves to not be achiveable by voluntary effort alone, there will be no problem with hired personel. But it is first important to ensure that the goals can't be achived by volunteers alone, then make it clear to the community why the hired personal is required and what the goals of this personal is. It should also be transparent to the community what such personal does, so that the community can follow the progress.

I don't think that that things that are done pretty well, or can be done pretty well by the community should be paid for even if the work can be done a little better with payed personal aid. If there are possibilities of increasing output by 10%, 20% or 50% by hiering personal that does the same things that volunteers do, I guess the negative effect on the volunteer community would reverse the gain. There has to be essential and obvious gains from hiering personal for this to be considered.