Why you should not pay for non-reciprocal peer
production
A contribution by Evan Prodromou, who heads Wikitravel
[1]:
"In the world of commercial wikis, the idea is often
floated that all contributors should be paid for their
efforts. I think this is a bad idea for a number of
reasons. I've outlined them below.
1. Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book
Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some
counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most
interesting is that charging people who do the wrong
thing often causes them to do it more, and paying
people to do the right thing causes them to do it
less.
The best wiki editing is done by people who believe in
an important and powerful cause. As so many Open
Content wikis show, people will move mountains to
achieve a noble purpose. If you mix in money, you've
instead changed the main motivation to $$$. You direct
people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and
instead towards grubbing for dollars. What kind of
people, and work, will you get out of that?
2. Low payment a disincentive. When people work for a
noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly
valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told
that their work is very low-valued. Which kind of work
do you want to do?
3. Legalities. Speaking of payment: if you engage in
an employment relationship with unknown, self-selected
people from any country in the world, for any amount
of money, you're going to have to fight your way
through labour laws and tax issues all the way to
bankruptcy.
4. Market economics. If you have open content, I can
copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and
still make money. So by paying contributors, you're
pricing yourself out of the market.
You don't have to pay people to do what they want to
do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is
$0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things
they don't want to do.
5. No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated
and auditable way to divvy up the money. If you do it
by character count, you leave out all the people who
engage in discussions, improve content by editing and
thus deleting characters, or make hugely important
changes with just a few characters. If you do it by
number of edits (or non-rolled-back edits), you judge
tiny and insignificant edits equal to large,
well-thought-out and very productive edits.
Decisions about the relative value of different
contributors to an article is too complicated to do
automatically. But if you have a subjective system --
have a human being evaluate contributions to an
article and portion out payments -- it will be subject
to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of
community frustration.
6. Gaming the system. People are really smart. If
there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to
game your payment system to get more money than they
actually deserve. They'll use long -- no,
lengthogonous -- words pointlessly to jack up their
word count. They'll set up robots to twiddle
out-of-the-way pages. They'll work on "hot" pages to
get more share of the higher profits, ignoring
low-volume pages that need a lot of work.
You'll end up in an antagonistic relationship with
your users, rather than a cooperative one. They'll be
trying to get as much money out of you as possible,
and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to
them -- or at least only get them to work on what you
want.
7. Paying for friends. If you can't convince people
that working on your project is worth their unpaid
time, then there's probably something wrong with your
project. People are going to be able to sense that --
it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy.
If you think you need to pay people to work on your
wiki, then you're doing something wrong. Instead of
trying to force your users to align with your business
interests, by paying them, you should re-align your
business interests to be more in tune with what
potential contributors want and need. You shouldn't
have to pay for friends, and you shouldn't have to pay
for wiki contributors."
(http://evan.prodromou.name/Paying_wiki_contributors)