Hiring editors

Teemu, this was discussed at length a few years ago (circa 2006), particularly re: editors in Africa, where the editor-native speaker ratio is quite low. Would paying someone make them more likely to contribute? Or would it be counterproductive, and against the wiki model where being a volunteer helps provide part of the motivation to contribute? The question also came up again during Wikimania 2008, re: the Arabic edition. Discussions regarding Arabic were interesting and a little unexpected; for instance, the large numbers of native Arabic speakers who preferred to contribute in English, the language of their university studies.

There've been a few attempts at getting editors in non-top-10 languages by throwing money at outreach efforts; to me, this seems more promising. For instance, in 2006 Ndsando Macha did outreach in Swahili, and in 2009 (this fall) there have been a series of Swahili Wikipedia workshops, sponsored by Google. This is not dissimilar from recruiting experts or any other population through outreach. Whether any of the people that are reached out to "stick" as editors probably depends on their own desires to edit, the availability of internet & computers, and their own time.

Paying translators to work on small languages is an approach that hasn't been taken in Wikimedia, afaik, and would be worth exploring.