If Wikipedia paid authors

[apakian]

Scenario: Wikipedia is an ad supported site, where authors were paid a % of total ad revenue,

depending on how popular the page they authored was.

Do you think this would promote higher quality content ?

[haasted]

Probably not.

In a recent thread[1], the consensus seemed to be that introducing monetary rewards for community participation was a bad idea, that would largely cause people to game the system. I should think that your idea would encounter similar obstacles.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2986681

[apakian → haasted]

If 10 authors wrote 10 versions of the page called /Bill_Gates

it would still be upto a group/committee/public to decide which version is the most relevant/highest quality.

The chosen author would then be entitled to whatever percent of the total ad revenue the site generated.

[haasted → apakian]

This sounds largely like Google Knol. (http://knol.google.com/k)

I don't think that is generally thought of as a very successful undertaking.

[apakian → haasted]

thanks for that..

[apakian]

In my spare time I tinker with content-recreation using wikipedia dumps.

Imagine software that could find and generate content as good or better than the quality on Wikipedia.

I guess skys the limit on how much you could make in ad revenue.

[willvarfar]

It might promote machine learning ;)