Proposal:Tip Jar for Editors

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  1. Achieve continued growth in readership
  2. Focus on quality content
  3. Increase Participation
  4. Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
  5. Encourage Innovation



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Summary

Enable users to tip editors.


Proposal

The Foundation sets up a micropayment system that allows users to make small payments to editors (a wiki tip-jar). The system would aggregate tips made from different users and make a payment to editors once every few months, or once a certain threshold of money is reached. Most editors would most likely only receive a few dollars and would probably gift their tips back to the foundation to keep the project running.

Users wanting to tip editors would pay a lump sum of say $100 into a tipping account from which they could allocate payments of a few dollars to different editors.

Motivation

  • Reward good editors.
  • Allow anonymous donations.
  • Help generate cash flow around the Foundation.
  • Opportunities for the Foundation to identify and request donations from users with money in their tipping account.
  • Possibly after a certain time any money left "untipped" could be automatically passed over to the foundation.

Key Questions

  • Might it lead to some sort of corruption? (i.e: companies or individuals paying editors to add or remove information)
  • How much money would actually find it's way back to the Foundation?
  • Would it change the motivation and focus of editors? Might certain topics get more attention than others if corporate tips started to become significant?
  • Would this system somehow infringe international banking regulations?

Potential Costs

  • Setting up the technology for a micropayment system
  • legal advice

References

Similar initiatives


Community Discussion

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