A New Coop Fund Pays People To Write To Wikipedia About Coops



I have added brief mentions of cooperatives to 9 popular Wikipedia articles, ranging from “France” to “The Internet”. Running a marketing campaign where one fact about cooperatives is shared 5 days a week provided a lot of material that was easy to use on Wikipedia. The edits in the picture below took an average of about 20 minutes each, or 3 hours in total, with 32 million annual visits in the articles they have been added to.

However, this approach has a weakness. 7 of the 9 edits are in the top 100 most read Wikipedia articles of all time. There are only a few articles left in the top 100 that would be relevant enough to include a mention about cooperatives. It gradually becomes harder to find as popular articles. As the articles have fewer views, reaching the same amount of views requires editing more articles. If the imperfect criteria of page views is used, the returns on effort are high but diminish quickly.

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I have started a simple platform cooperative to fund this sort of outreach, which works in the following way:

- Members pay 1$/month to join.
- They democratically request and prioritise articles and distribute the money to the members who have created content about coops to Wikipedia. 
- Members get a 20$ for writing their first article requested by the coop. I have donated 100$ to the fund to pay for the first 5 members for their first article.

 The group is organised through Loomio, a digital tool for group democratic decision making developed by a worker cooperative. The funds are collected through Open Collective, an alternative to Patreon, hosted by Platform6 cooperative.

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If you are interested in joining, click here and join the decision making and discussion in the Loomio.