Proposal:Charge for extra Userspace
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
We should create a micro-payment system and charge users for extra userspace and tools to customise that space, containing elements from Proposal:Launch 'My Wikipedia' and Proposal:Wikimedia social networking platform but with a small charge.
Proposal
Users are given for free a basic userspace. Beyond a certain size users are charged percentages of pennies (or regional equivalent). They could be charged (in some way I haven't thought out completely) to make their user space "public" or linked to Articles in the Main space. Users could also pay for additional services.
An example- a user creates a page about their grandparents, or another person, as outlined in Proposal:People should be allowed to create autobiographies. They are not particularly notable, at present the page would be deleted. Under this proposal the user would userfy the page and for a pittance purchase the Genealogy template. This could allow them to fill in their family tree, find other users who are connected, place the family tree into context with the historical or geographic articles on Wikipedia. So in the future it may be possible to look at an article about an event or something like this [1] and be able to see a link on the article that would show the people who had served aboard this submarine, or worked in a particular factory, etc.
We could form relationships with local societies, a local history group, as in Proposal:To diversify participation and create high quality content we should use amateur resources who could provide genealogy support.
This model could be extended to other services/tools/extra-space, as in Proposal:Wikimedia social networking platform.
Motivation
(On Wikipedia) Articles are created by users that are not encyclopedic and are deleted: Corporate spam, fan sites, personal pages, etc. Users could be encouraged to move these to their personal userspace, similar to Userfy. This would cut down on the creation of such pages in the Main space. Articles on controversial subjects could have space, again reducing vandalism. Fan sites, nonsense pages, personal biogs of non-notable people, etc could be then hosted on the users space. Instead of fighting to remove such material we could encourage people to become actual users of Wikipedia with a sense of ownership of part of the project. Social networking, such as MyFace et al, generate large levels of participation and we should use that kind of model, but without flashing banner ads.
Key Questions
- will collecting percentages of pennies actually cost more than its worth?
- Do we want to be web hosting corporate websites?
- What do we do if someone has been paying us to store an attack page under their account, can we still delete it? Do we have to refund their money?
- How do we differentiate between things that we definitely don't want to charge users for such as drafting new articles in their usespace, things that we probably don't want to charge for such as some userboxes and non wiki info and things that some editors definitely would want to charge for, such as some userboxes and sekrit pages? WereSpielChequers 01:37, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
Potential Costs
Micro-payment system. Admin. Change in culture maybe?
References
- [2] Micro-payments
Community Discussion
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