Hiring editors

After re-thinking the issue, I think paying for someone in a local Chapter to do promotion, awareness raising, workshops about Wikipedia is definitely a better idea than paying for editors.

The local communities should "own" their Wikipedia. To boost the creation of local communities, we probably could do a better job. We could give resources (or raise funds with them) to do Wikipedia / Wikimedia campaigns.

I think paying for someone to translate the English/German/French Wikipedia would be against the Wikipedia Philosophy - at least the way I have interpreted it.

One of the beauties of Wikipedia (if you ask me=) is that all language version are different, depending on the language (culture) they are written. In that sense Wikipedia is not free from bias, but culturally-bias in a good way (most topics in the World are not that simple). For me this is important, as it makes different interpretations visible and so facilitates global discourse about important topics.

Teemu22:32, 10 January 2010

I agree, Teemu. So the followup question is, how could we be doing a better job of boosting the creation of local communities? If we're going to spend money, what should we spend that money on?

Check out the work that the Local Language Projects Task Force has been doing in this area and see if that resonates. I'd love to hear feedback and other ideas.

Eekim17:41, 11 January 2010
 

Very true. We can only pay for special efforts (like outreach), not for something which is/can be done in numbers (editing). Competitions and awards might be better a use of money than wages. For example giving an award (partner with Creative Commons?) for yearly most valuable institutional contribution to expanding free content (like Bundesarchiv donation). We should build up these random acts of kindness in the media. WMF should ask for more, but also be willing to reward (share our brand goodwill) those who give - not only money, also multimedia/databases... We need a competitive drives not only for cash, but images etc. --Ras 10:54, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Ras10:54, 12 January 2010