Paying to open assessors

Scope

There are assessments that are laborous and the assessors must be paid salary to make sure that the assessment gets finished. This may lead into unfair situations as some paople are paid but others are expected to participate bona fide. Even if the amounts of money were not large, the feeling of unfairness is a threat to the success of an assessment.

How can the orderer of an assessment evaluate a fair price for their contribution and pay for it?

Definition

There should be a threshold for payments, so that not anyone who has made a single edit gets something. The treshold should be technical and simple, such as at least 20 edits to at least 5 pages during at least 5 different days. This shows that the participant is committed to the assessment and has a wider view on the assessment during the process. Even if the participant is only interested in one single page where she has a single major contribution, it is not difficult to edit other pages enough to pass the threshold and get the major contribution evaluated.

Another criteria is that the participant registers herself to a system so that her real name, social security number, address, and other relevant information is known. This information is of course confidential and is only given to the assessment owner if there is something to pay. The database of personal information is maintained by the [Open Assessors' Network]].

The criteria for payment is in principle determined by the owner separately for each assessment. In practice, there should be general rules for all assessments, and case-specific applications may be used. The general rules are described on this page.

The owner can divide the assessment into smaller pieces and attach a price to each. This price is then divided by the participants in that part.

Some part of the evaluation can be based on the amount of work done. But this cannot be evaluated by the amount of text contributed, so some other system, or possibly several systems, should be used.

Also the importance and scientific merit should be evaluated. It is not easy to think other possibilities than peer evaluation by other participants.