Wikipedia talk:Reward board

FAQ and FEO (Frequently Expressed Objections) In the spirit of the original PROD proposal, here are some FAQs and FEOs about this board so we can avoid repeating ourselves. What problem does this solve? This will help solve the basic problem of Wikipedia: it isn't done yet. In particular, it could be used to help combat systemic bias. Bounties could be set to encourage work in areas that Wikipedia currently covers poorly: African topics, for example. Another suggestion is that it could provide incentives to reduce the large article maintenance backlog. It also solves another problem: Wikipedians need money. More to the point, many Wikipedians pay for books and other information resources simply to perform research for Wikipedia. Reimbursing their costs will only make this easier for a large number of Wikipedians. WP:JOB could also be used as an avenue to purchase professional photography of article subjects to be released under GFDL, reducing or perhaps eliminating our reliance upon fair use. What postings would be allowed? This is currently under discussion, but soliciting any violation of policy (see the first objection) would of course be disallowed. How long may challenges remain open? Challenges may remain open for a maximum duration of one year. After that period of time, the challenge will be moved to expired requests; however, the author of the challenge may repost the challenge with a new expiration period. The aim of this policy is to keep the board clutter-free, ensure editors are available to fulfill such challenges, and to ensure the challenges are still valid. How would payment be enforced? Payment is at the sole discretion of the poster and this should be looked at more as an entry to a contest than a guaranteed trade. Does this have precedent? Yes—Deutsche Wikipedia has something exactly like this currently in place at de:Wikipedia:Auftragsarbeiten. Won't WP:JOB open up Wikipedia for corporate-sponsored POV editing? The fact is, Wikipedia is already vulnerable to sponsored POV editing. As Wikipedia:Requests for comment/United States Congress shows us, even congressional staffers in the United States federal government have spent time "on the job" trying to skew Wikipedia. But, supposing that WP:JOB was active, wouldn't it be used by corporations to skew editing? Again, this is unlikely. If someone posted "Make the article Microsoft more favorable to the company" with a bounty of $1,000, the bounty itself would be delisted and countless Wikipedians would take action to protect the article against POV-skewing. If the bounty ever was paid, it would be wasted money, as the "favorable" version would quickly be reverted and the editor who took the bounty would face immediate action—even a block or a ban. It seems so much easier for someone working in Microsoft's PR department to be assigned this task without us ever being the wiser, and this is without doubt the route that our hypothetical Microsoft would take. There's a related issue: what if the bounty was to "Bring the Microsoft article to featured article status", again with Microsoft overtly or covertly sponsoring the bounty. There's two possibilities: either the paid-for Microsoft article would meet FA standards on its own merits (in which case, the hypothetical Microsoft would have in fact helped us) or the paid-for Microsoft article would be biased. If the article itself is biased, then a large number of Wikipedia editors would oppose its nomination on this basis, and mark the page itself as {{pov}}, again derailing the FA nomination. Even in this case it would be better for Microsoft to hire PR staff instead of posting here. Although simply having a large number of FAs related to your company in order to increase visibility may accomplish the company's goal without needing any POV editing, and the very nature of the board can further WP:BIAS, as evidenced by the Pokemon-related postings ("any Pokemon-related GA/FA"). Moulder 23:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC) Shouldn't editors contribute out of altruism, instead of monetary gain? Wikipedians contribute for a variety of reasons, ranging from pure altruism to logorrhea to enjoyment of the work itself. What's ultimately important is the goal—to write a free, open-content enyclopedia—not the private motivations of the contributors. Isn't this against the spirit of open source/free content? Ask the Linux community. Many programmers have been paid to work on the Linux kernel by corporate employers, and the Free Software Foundation has hired full-time employees to work on GNU projects. Bounty boards are also employed in open source software for bug fixes and feature requests[1]. Even Wikipedia has had a paid contributor—our former editor in chief Larry Sanger, who was an employee of Jimmy Wales assigned full-time to Wikipedia until 2002. If, as a matter of principle, we cannot accept paid contributions, then we ought to take a close look at his edits as well as all otherwise acceptably licensed photographs from paid photographers (such as those taken by NASA researchers and released into the public domain).

Suburban Express

The user Suburban_Express was criticized and blocked because some user(s) felt that it seemed to be shared username. Pursuant to the block, our posts to the reward board and bounty board were deleted, presumably because the username was blocked. I have registered a new username that is specific to an individual and is therefore compliant with wikipedia rules, and re-posted our entries on the two boards. Suburban Express President (talk) 20:23, 26 October 2013 (UTC)

Example of Wikipedia related Kickstarter campaign

See [2]. Rather than offering rewards or bounties, here we have the approach from the other end. Any thoughts on this? Should this model be mentioned on this page? Cc User:NittyG and User:bobrayner. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:05, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Getting funds for the hardware or physical material needed to contribute isn't new. WM grants are given out for this all the time. That was a great example of a kickstarter: someone with the personal bandwidth to take as many photos as he can get objects to photograph, working with both a physical museum and WP and the Internet Archive to create a combined physical + digital collection. – SJ + 16:13, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

Stats from the archive

I just looked at the archives; it looks like rewards given out are almost entirely barnstars, and those are clustered into a few successful backlog drives. Other uses of the board have been mostly unsuccessful. Only 5% of the rewards have been individuals getting cash; and half of those were for a single topical drive (for which we've since developed better contest-like tactics).

- 160 barnstars given out as part of four backlog drives (ce & wikification); 60 other barnstars, 1 reverse barnstar (someone offered ce in exchange for a new barnstar design), 2 on-topic gifts.

- 12 cash rewards, 4 asked for money to go to the wmf or another charity.

Perhaps what we need is a board for barnstar-challenges and contests, highlighting regular topical and backlog drives. – SJ + 18:16, 5 November 2013 (UTC)

As we are going to keep this, do we need to tighten the criteria a bit?

Given this page is now kept (which I can understand given the voting), my question is whether we need to tighten up the criteria. Hence I have a couple of proposals below.

Should we eliminate cash rewards?

Given all the hoohaa about this, do we in the spirit of eschewing paid editing eliminate cash rewards on this page? Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 05:05, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Eliminate

1. They are completely anomalous in our present situation. It's absurd of us to strongly discourage paid editing, and then openly provide a place to advertise it. (Needless to say, I have no objection to awarding barnstars, and I am uncertain about merchandise--depending of course on its value. But cash , regardless of amount, is unequivocal. DGG ( talk ) 20:06, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Do not eliminate

1. In my proposal below, I added the line "while posters may offer items of monetary value as rewards, posters cannot offer items of monetary value if they are affiliated with the article they want worked on". As I don't really see the difference between "Improve this and I'll give you twenty bucks" and "Improve this and I'll give you a twenty buck video game", I think that this is the best solution. Sven Manguard Wha? 05:36, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
2. As long as payment for COI editing, e.g. whitewashing or trashing of an article, is clearly excluded I see no objection to cash rewards. For the matter of that we do not "strongly discourage'" paid editing as opposed to paid advocay, not IMO should we. DES ^(talk) 22:07, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
3. As long as the community can veto a proposal for a cash payment (see below), I think they should be allowed. And I don't agree that there should be a restriction on who can offer a cash reward, as long as they're not asking for something improper (including whitewashing). -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:20, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
4. No need to eliminate cash payments for requests for content that follows Wikipedia guidelines and policies. Sure, we should eliminate cash payments for advocacy requests, but most Reward Board activity simply asks for "better content", not "lovely content that will advocate a biased position". - I'm not that crazy (talk) 03:11, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

• Discuss here. Personally I find this a really tricky one for myself and am finding myself sitting on the fence (initially wanted to eliminate but now not so sure...). Happy to see what others think. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 05:05, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
• I'm that happy about people offering cash to improve things like core articles, but for more obscure articles that people are interested in, offers are rarely taken up, so seem a bit pointless (WP:SOFIXIT springs to mind). I don't think the recent posts by User:Cla68 e.g. Wikipedia:Reward_board#Comcast_Business are acceptable however - they look to me like a paid editor outsourcing their work to someone else. Even if this might not break an explicit 'rules' it does fly in the face of everything else the community agrees on regarding editors being paid to write articles about companies. Encouraging people to add content like this is simply unacceptable IMO. SmartSE (talk) 12:25, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Strengthen ability to get rid of questionable rewards

Enable the ability of an editor to raise concerns about any particular entry and raise it for discussion on the talk page. Thus, if an entry was deemed by consensus to run contra to the aims of a NPOV encyclopedia then it would be removed. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 05:05, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Veto ability

1. In my proposal below, I added the line "If an editor thinks that a posting made on this page is inappropriate, they may challenge it at Wikipedia talk:Reward Board, and if there is a consensus there that the posting is inappropriate, the entry will be closed and archived.". I think this is the best option (and yes, I did steal the idea from someone at the MfD). Sven Manguard Wha? 05:38, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
2. I think we need something like this spelt out. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:28, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
3. Yes, this should be spelled out on the Reward board itself, and yes, this is a good idea. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 04:21, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Discussion

• Discuss here. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 05:05, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Perhaps this is too complicated. We might easily get into more discussion than the matter is worth, by adding yet another venue for it. DGG ( talk ) 20:31, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Can you elaborate on where? I thought a veto process was fairly local to this page. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 22:02, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Limit sponsors to established Wikipedians in good standing

This might be the loop hole that allowed this idea to go bad: someone created an account, then immediately went to this page & put up cash offers for specific articles. If this is limited only to established Wikipedians -- suitably active for a reasonable amount of time -- it will make monitoring a lot easier. What exactly is meant by "suitably active for a reasonable amount of time" can be hashed out if the general idea is found acceptable.

Discussion

• Discuss here. -- llywrch (talk) 05:27, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Interesting idea. Need to think about this one. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:28, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Proposed revised introduction

In light of the recent MfD discussion regarding this page, I am proposing that the introduction to Wikipedia:Reward board be replaced with the following:

The reward board is page where users who want a specific task related to Wikipedia (such as the improvement of an article to featured article status, the clearing of a backlog, or the editing of an image) can offer a reward to editors willing to take on and complete that task.

While it is up to the person posting the reward to set the terms of the request (what is being asked for, what is being offered in return, and how long the request is valid), certain terms are expressly prohibited. While it is perfectly acceptable to ask that an article be improved in general ("my favorite rapper is MC Example, please bring his article up to GA status"), it is not acceptable to ask for specific content changes ("my favorite rapper is MC Example, please remove or alter the criticism section in his article"). Additionally, while posters may offer items of monetary value as rewards, posters cannot offer items of monetary value if they are affiliated with the article they want worked on. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest for information about monetary compensation and possible conflicts of interest. Finally, it should go without saying that posters cannot ask for someone to violate site policies or engage in meatpuppetry on their behalf. If an editor thinks that a posting made on this page is inappropriate, they may challenge it at Wikipedia talk:Reward Board, and if there is a consensus there that the posting is inappropriate, the entry will be closed and archived.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not hiring contributors through this venue and no payments are made by the Foundation. This is purely a page for editors to offer rewards to other editors. Challenges may remain open for a maximum duration of one year. After that period of time, the challenge will be moved to expired requests; however, the author of the challenge may repost the challenge with a new expiration period. The aim of this policy is to keep the board clutter-free, ensure editors are available to fulfill such challenges, and to ensure the challenges are still valid.

This is the current lead and instructions, for easy comparison with the above proposed revision

The reward board is an informal page where users who want a specific task related to Wikipedia (such as the promotion of an article to featured article status or the editing of an image) can offer a reward to editors willing to take on the task. The execution and details of the transaction are the responsibility of the participating parties, and the reward can be monetary, goods (books, cookies, etc.), barnstars, or tit-for-tat editing (like improving another article). Reward board is similar to the Bounty board; however, instead of a donation to the Wikimedia Foundation, payment is made directly to a specific editor. The Wikimedia Foundation is not hiring contributors and no payments are made by the Foundation. This is purely a page for editors to offer rewards to other editors. Challenges may remain open for a maximum duration of one year. After that period of time, the challenge will be moved to expired requests; however, the author of the challenge may repost the challenge with a new expiration period. The aim of this policy is to keep the board clutter-free, ensure editors are available to fulfill such challenges, and to ensure the challenges are still valid. See Wikipedia:Conflict of interest for information about monetary compensation and possible conflicts of interest.

Thoughts? Sven Manguard Wha? 05:31, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

I think we need something like this to really clarify how it works, despite it being quite a long intro. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:32, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

the key thing is removing the cash, but a cut off date would help. DGG ( talk ) 20:29, 9 November 2013 (UTC)