"The Solution" ... make 'em pay to edit. Options Rating

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Elsewhere I was rambling on to myself about how the Peed-ia - because of its influence now in creating humanity's collective intelligence - has become one of those things, like spam, that individuals and entities (business, political, whatever) just have to accept, face and engage with at some level.

As with spam, of course, dealing with the surface tide of shite that often arises is done our own time, effort and cost and not the offenders. I wonder how much handling the Peed-ia has added to PR bills internationally; I wonder how much time, money and resources are invested into politically?

One of the "solutions" that is often mooted for spam is to make the spammers pay ... or more broadly, make everyone have to pay for sending email just as they do for sending postal mail. It is often argued that this single step would knock the head on the spammers' industry, and probably would. At the very least, it would hugely change its financial appeal and reduce its quantity. Obviously, there are objections to paid email from other quarters.

So I was wondering, what if individuals had to pay to make their edit to the Peed-ia?

Surely, immediately, it would cut down a vast swath of idiocy and make individuals far more cautious about their manic phases and edit revision wars? If I had to pay, say, even just 5c per edit ... surely I would stop and think before I made them, composing them, and myself, offline first.

It would add the other benefit of giving the rest of us a huge amount of entertainment watching how much others were willing to throw at their current obsession.

• Having to register your credit or debit card when you joined would instantly reduce bogus or kiddie registrations and annihilate sockpuppetry or late nite drunken driveby vandalism.

• Having one's credit or debit card details held would instantly invoke some sobriety, as one would become instantly traceable and suable.

• Admin snitching or arbcom jockeying could become paid for services requiring cash payment down in escrow.

• The money raised could be used to pay for real academics, a proper editorial staff and professional, independent arbitrators.

I serious think individuals ought to be made to value other human beings time and energy and the lack of this, or the cheapness of destroying someone's life, is one of the root problems with the current model. It costs nothing to offend. Even phone stalking ... which is surely the precusor to wikistalking ... used to cost something (and be traceable).

Of course, this is unlikely to happen but it does raise the idea of invoking a virtual economy or currency, as with other online role play games, where individuals have to pay to edit but are reward for using <ref> tags, starting new topic, or by doing mundane housework. It would be difficult but not impossible to manage technically.

I don't see why not. In the old day, the crank and obsessive pamphleteers would at the very least have to pay for their pamphlets or photocopies. Putting a financial constraint back onto their mental ejaculations and soapboxing would add a seriousness to the causes which they are likely to take up.

Trolling or personal attacks would also be less attractive.

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy:

[A User]

[indent]• Having to register your credit or debit card when you joined would instantly reduce bogus or kiddie registrations and annihilate sockpuppetry or late nite drunken driveby vandalism.

• Having one's credit or debit card details held would instantly invoke some sobriety, as one would become instantly traceable and suable.

This idea was previously mooted by User:UseOnceAndDestroy. The question is, would you trust your credit details with an organization like Wikipedia? I probably wouldn't.

[Viridae]

If you had to pay only the cranks would do so (possibly the case now but to a lesser extent).

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

If you had to pay only the cranks would do so (possibly the case now but to a lesser extent).

... which would then bring about radically needed changes having to happen because of the deterioration of quality and standards.

This issue of valuing other people's time and energy is important. If many, or most, of your contributors are kids, or individuals with borderline personality disorders, they are going to have little to no idea, or care, of the real value of other people's time. (Read, the type of contributors the project needs ... grown ups/responsible, informed individuals).

At the very least, require "court fees" for admin complaints - from both parties - and use that income to employ independent arbitrators. The winner receiving their deposit back.

All of a sudden, the attraction and rise of Scout Masters into high positions within the hive becomes quite clear to me.

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy:

[UseOnceAndDestroy]

This idea was previously mooted by User:UseOnceAndDestroy.

It wasn't. I wondered why wikipediots were resistant to eliminating use of multiple identities through verifiable identification, for example using CC authorisation. That's not the same thing as charging a subscription. Whatever else wikipedia is doing to you, it isn't improving your reading comprehension skills.

[thekohser]

I endorse the "pay to edit" idea, as long as the money went toward noble causes, and not Gardner and Moeller's $470,000 compensation budget.

So, I guess I can't support this idea, after all.

[GlassBeadGame]

It reminds me of Chris Rock's suggestion for an alternative to gun control. Charge $15,000 per bullet. "At $15,000 per bullet there are no innocent-by-standers." This would also be tonic for BLP editing.

[anthony]

So I was wondering, what if individuals had to pay to make their edit to the Peed-ia?

Then it'd all be spam, instead of mostly spam.

The money raised could be used to pay for real academics, a proper editorial staff and professional, independent arbitrators.

The money already raised could be used for that. It isn't.

So, sorry, you've got it backwards. If anything, people should be paid to edit, not required to pay to edit. If you're going to charge someone money, it should be the readers, not the writers.

Unfortunately, micropayments don't work (plus, Internet users don't seem willing to pay for quality anyway (and there's also that pesky GFDL, and that pesky "free" in the mission statement, and that pesky IRS with its pesky rules for charities)).

This post has been edited by anthony:

[anthony]

At the very least, require "court fees" for admin complaints - from both parties - and use that income to employ independent arbitrators. The winner receiving their deposit back.

That would be interesting - pay for professional edit war arbitration. I'd still say no, though.

Maybe if the winner receives 1.5x their deposit back, and there were a set of objective rules for the arbitrators to determine the winner by, and the loser could appeal the arbitration decision in a real world courtroom...

This post has been edited by anthony:

[EricBarbour]

If I had to pay, say, even just 5c per edit ... surely I would stop and think before I made them, composing them, and myself, offline first.

Make it $1 per edit and I'm on-board. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

It won't happen, but nothing would fix WMF's fundraising problems more quickly....

[anthony]

If I had to pay, say, even just 5c per edit ... surely I would stop and think before I made them, composing them, and myself, offline first.

Make it $1 per edit and I'm on-board. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/tongue.gif)

Me too. I'm all for Wikipedia destroying itself.

It won't happen, but nothing would fix WMF's fundraising problems more quickly....

What fundraising problems?

[A User]

This idea was previously mooted by User:UseOnceAndDestroy.

It wasn't. I wondered why wikipediots were resistant to eliminating use of multiple identities through verifiable identification, for example using CC authorisation. That's not the same thing as charging a subscription. Whatever else wikipedia is doing to you, it isn't improving your reading comprehension skills.

More likely due to the poor grammar in your posts, more than anything.

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

Hmmn, I had no idea about the $470,000 ... that really does make the whole thing utterly obscene. Its no better than one big ugly spambot run by unpaid slaves. And no wonder she is look so smug. Where is this clearly documented?

But, yes, I'd go along with the income being put to something more useful. The big issues are,

a) how to get people to value other people's time and energy? Nothing but some hard hits to wallet will do that.

b) how to get more truly independent, accountable, professional individuals in there handling the critical functions.

If you cant, it really becomes one's social responsibility to destroy it as it is, or make it as impossible to function as possible, in order that it must change because living with or educating the idiot factor and allow them to spew and rampage over the collective intelligence of humanity is just impossible ... and wrong.

I pulled this from somewhere random ...

“We’re over the moon happy,” said Sue Gardner , executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Yeah, I’m sure she is. Nobody seems to realize (or care) that she budgeted over $470,000 in salary for herself in 2009, along with her boy-wonder Deputy Director, Erik Moeller. You know, he’s the guy who stood before a conference assembled in Berlin to tell them that “nonviolent child pornography does no harm”. He was hired without Gardner posting a job description for the Deputy Director position, nor conducting a competitive candidate search for the post.

I wonder which 14,600 donors accounted for the Gardner/Moeller salary fund? Did they intend for their money to go to their wallets, or did they think they were donating to a “shoestring” operation devoted to free knowledge. I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, in THIS economy, budgeting $472,000 to pay just two people is excessive.

Furthermore, nobody seems to care that LAST YEAR, they begged for $2,573,000 for Technology, but then they ended up spending only $900,000 on Technology for the year. So… if Wikipedia can run on $900,000 worth of servers and bandwidth, why the $6 million budget?

Do the math, kids.

Non-paid volunteers basically “run” Wikipedia, and always have. So the Wikimedia Foundation staff exists for what? I’m thinking they exist for the purpose of raising funds to pay themselves. And that’s why I’m so concerned we haven’t seen any philanthropy watchdog organizations (like CharityNavigator.org) conduct one of their ratings reviews of the Wikimedia Foundation. There is NO WAY they would receive a coveted 5-star rating. They’re spending their money on everything BUT the services that fulfill the mission.

Ian Wilhelm, trust that this WAS indeed a good question for you to pose. It’s just sad that most of your readers are going to be too naive to fully understand it.

— Gregory Kohs

(IMG:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg/250px-Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg)
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... we're
earning $470,000 you dickheads!!!

"I am over the moon happy", said Sue Gardner,
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

There is this interesting that that happens to almost all "non-profit" "charitable project which start off as quite genuine and volunteer based ... but then over time, if successful, solidify and attract a certain confident middle class of individuals who then infest the projects and start to feed off the goodwill.

One of their favorite lines is, "Oh, we have to pay those kind of wages to attract the right kind of individuals" by which they mean 'their kind of individuals'. There is a sort of unspoken collusion between them all as they pass through one revolving door to the next across the voluntary and public sectors.

There are 'other kinds of people' who are quite idealistic and genuine who would do the same jobs for much less for ethical reasons but they are quickly sidelined because, in my opinion, the unspoken agenda is quite clear to those in on the rack off.

Often, the payments are justified on the basis of how much money they can bring in and, hence, those individuals increase THEIR own values by using the non-profit platforms and moving amongst them.

Meanwhile the serfs in the server rooms or the slaves producing the actual content that makes the operation possible are treated with increasing demands and increasing contempt and forced to live with sociopathic 'care in the community' candidates.

I have no idea what this individuals is actually about as I have not investigated her, is Sue a noun or a verb?

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy:

[thekohser]

Hmmn, I had no idea about the $470,000 ... that really does make the whole thing utterly obscene. Its no better than one big ugly spambot run by unpaid slaves. And no wonder she is look so smug. Where is this clearly documented?

See page 9, and look for the number "472".

[victim of censorship]

Hmmn, I had no idea about the $470,000 ... that really does make the whole thing utterly obscene. Its no better than one big ugly spambot run by unpaid slaves. And no wonder she is look so smug. Where is this clearly documented?

But, yes, I'd go along with the income being put to something more useful. The big issues are,

a) how to get people to value other people's time and energy? Nothing but some hard hits to wallet will do that.

b) how to get more truly independent, accountable, professional individuals in there handling the critical functions.

If you cant, it really becomes one's social responsibility to destroy it as it is, or make it as impossible to function as possible, in order that it must change because living with or educating the idiot factor and allow them to spew and rampage over the collective intelligence of humanity is just impossible ... and wrong.

I pulled this from somewhere random ...

“We’re over the moon happy,” said Sue Gardner , executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Yeah, I’m sure she is. Nobody seems to realize (or care) that she budgeted over $470,000 in salary for herself in 2009, along with her boy-wonder Deputy Director, Erik Moeller. You know, he’s the guy who stood before a conference assembled in Berlin to tell them that “nonviolent child pornography does no harm”. He was hired without Gardner posting a job description for the Deputy Director position, nor conducting a competitive candidate search for the post.

I wonder which 14,600 donors accounted for the Gardner/Moeller salary fund? Did they intend for their money to go to their wallets, or did they think they were donating to a “shoestring” operation devoted to free knowledge. I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, in THIS economy, budgeting $472,000 to pay just two people is excessive.

Furthermore, nobody seems to care that LAST YEAR, they begged for $2,573,000 for Technology, but then they ended up spending only $900,000 on Technology for the year. So… if Wikipedia can run on $900,000 worth of servers and bandwidth, why the $6 million budget?

Do the math, kids.

Non-paid volunteers basically “run” Wikipedia, and always have. So the Wikimedia Foundation staff exists for what? I’m thinking they exist for the purpose of raising funds to pay themselves. And that’s why I’m so concerned we haven’t seen any philanthropy watchdog organizations (like CharityNavigator.org) conduct one of their ratings reviews of the Wikimedia Foundation. There is NO WAY they would receive a coveted 5-star rating. They’re spending their money on everything BUT the services that fulfill the mission.

Ian Wilhelm, trust that this WAS indeed a good question for you to pose. It’s just sad that most of your readers are going to be too naive to fully understand it.

— Gregory Kohs

(IMG:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg/250px-Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg)
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... we're
earning $470,000 you dickheads!!!

"I am over the moon happy", said Sue Gardner,
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

There is this interesting that that happens to almost all "non-profit" "charitable project which start off as quite genuine and volunteer based ... but then over time, if successful, solidify and attract a certain confident middle class of individuals who then infest the projects and start to feed off the goodwill.

One of their favorite lines is, "Oh, we have to pay those kind of wages to attract the right kind of individuals" by which they mean 'their kind of individuals'. There is a sort of unspoken collusion between them all as they pass through one revolving door to the next across the voluntary and public sectors.

There are 'other kinds of people' who are quite idealistic and genuine who would do the same jobs for much less for ethical reasons but they are quickly sidelined because, in my opinion, the unspoken agenda is quite clear to those in on the rack off.

Often, the payments are justified on the basis of how much money they can bring in and, hence, those individuals increase THEIR own values by using the non-profit platforms and moving amongst them.

Meanwhile the serfs in the server rooms or the slaves producing the actual content that makes the operation possible are treated with increasing demands and increasing contempt and forced to live with sociopathic 'care in the community' candidates.

I have no idea what this individuals is actually about as I have not investigated her, is Sue a noun or a verb?

QUESTION:

What does Sue Garner and the lowly mosquito biting the nearest warm blooded critter have in common?

ANSWER:
They're both Blood sucking, soulless insects, living in a dank bottomless swamp, where jungle law is the rule of the land.

This post has been edited by victim of censorship:

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

(IMG:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg/250px-Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg)
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... we're
earning $470,000 you dickheads!!!

"I am over the moon happy", said Sue Gardner,
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

So, is that $472,000 plus expenses? Do we have a better breakdown of it?

Is there is no chance of us being allowed to elect our own Wiki President? (My vote, of course, going for Playground Kate as long as she wears her Scout Leader outfit ... she's big into WOW and she LOVES nurds).

Or do we not only not get paid but, because we pay not taxes ... we get not representation either?

If we can have a robot revolution, cant we at least have some Wiki-Teamsters anyone?

(I'd suggest a writers' strike but I fear it would have no effect).

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy:

[dogbiscuit]

(I'd suggest a writers' strike but I fear it would have no effect).

I thought the fear was that it might improve Wikipedia... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wacko.gif)

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

(IMG:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg/250px-Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg)
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... we're
earning $470,000 you dickheads!!!

"I am over the moon happy", said Sue Gardner,
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I thought the fear was that it might improve Wikipedia... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wacko.gif)

Hmmnnn ... I was putting them in a different category from the ADHD sufferers doing occupational therapy.

So what do we need? A democratic human rights movement within the Pee-dia community to encourage the unpaid serfs ... a labor movement to establish unions ... social workers and a peace corp ... or therapists? I'd say the project was ripe for some Situationist.

What I wonder now is,

a) now that the foundation as the money, and the existing content, how much do they actually need the serfs any more?

b) How much intellectual property rights are actually being abused in the content?

[EricBarbour]

So what do we need? A democratic human rights movement within the Pee-dia community to encourage the unpaid serfs ... a labor movement to establish unions ... social workers and a peace corp ... or therapists? I'd say the project was ripe for some Situationist.

Situationist? Hah. My ass.

They need professional leadership. Not whoever Jimbo likes/gets sucked off by.

[Cock-up-over-conspiracy]

(IMG:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/97/Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg/250px-Sue_Gardner_Headshot_A_%28medium%29_FULL.jpg)
Ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... ha ... we're
earning $470,000 you dickheads!!!

"I am over the moon happy", said Sue Gardner,
executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Situationist? Hah. My ass. They need professional leadership. Not whoever Jimbo likes/gets sucked off by.

"Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia boss make out in Amsterdam" ... dare I say, do we have any reliable sources for that?

I have never understood the rationale of why, "just because we are dealing with 'lots of money', we have to pay lots of money (for the few)". Surely there are a few good people of integrity that would do the same or better for less?

Or it is a kind of 'buy out of the soul'. "How much would it cost to incorporate you into the co-pocrisy."

Of course it is in the interest of this class to encourage the myths whilst not have to deal with the problems. Would you risk that kind of pay package if you were in on the rake off - whilst the value is created by other for free? Best to just leave things as they are and time your departure to a more well paid position well.

• Does Sue Gardner ever edit?
• Has Sue Gardner ever clerked an arbcom?
• Has Sue Gardner ever faced and dealt with one of the sociopaths wandering around her institution?

This post has been edited by Cock-up-over-conspiracy: