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

Co-ops
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I’ve started a new platform cooperative/democratically governed fund. Here is an article about it, but a short explanation is this:

  • Anyone can join for 1$/month, using Open Collective hosted by the Platform6 cooperative.

  • The money is distributed on 1-member-1-vote basis to members who have written to Wikipedia about coops, using a Loomio group.

  • Members can request articles in Loomio again.

  • I personally donate 20$ for every member for the first article they write that has been requested (the member herself/himself can request the article).

I got the idea after adding 9 mentions of coops to popular Wikipedia articles ranging from “France” to “The Internet” (see image attached), with combined 32 million views/year. It took maybe few hours to add the mentions, so this seemed like a rather effective way of doing outreach.

Image 08-12-2019 at 14.59

Eventually I would love to build the articles into a Wikibooks (a sister project of Wikipedia) project about cooperatives - an ever expanding, regularly updated, comprehensive and collaboratively written text book about coops.

I would also like to build a new coop template (a thing that it’s in the bottom of coop related articles) for Wikipedia - I’ve attached an image of what it could look like.

Image 08-12-2019 at 14.59

This is not against Wikipedia guidelines, as long as everyone discloses their affiliation openly.

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Really nice idea for a template. As it happens our co-op accountant (in Manchester) is a co-op, and they are interested in networking with other accountancy co-ops, of which there do not seem to be very many. So for the template, I would suggest maybe “Finance” rather than “Banking”, and accountancy could be a leaf page?

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