I’m a freelancer, both in writing and in design. Since I’m also very conscious about being in control of my life, as in avoiding clutter and not being stressed out by work (and other things), that means I think about freelancing. A lot, actually. It is hard work, you usually have numerous deadlines and are probably short on time. Pay ranges from poor (non-existent actually, but that’s not my style) to fair, rarely particularly great, but sometimes good.

Don’t get me wrong, I love freelancing. It fits me. That being said, I rarely recommend anyone to start a freelancing career, I rather tend to tell them that I’ve got a masochistic trait. Or something like that.

However, I do believe I’ve found the perfect freelancing gig. Sadly enough, no one have offered it to me yet, and I’m not sure if it is available for the money required to make it all go round.

So what is it?

Wiki page writer. As in doing pages for Wikipedia or similar.

What? Why?

Think about it. You get to write about a niche topic, and get to do it in-depth. This means that you either have to know a lot about it, which in turn probably means that you’re already passionate about it, or that you’ll have to do a ton of research and learn about the particular topic. Imagine that, getting paid to write, and getting paid to learn new things.

Ideally, it would be a gig where you could spend half a day, perhaps even less, working on it, otherwise it would be too much of a chore (although it is, of course, being work and all), and that would bring the fun from it. It is not all that hard to research topics, but having to do it on a tight time schedule, the traditional freelancing way, will make it tedious and stressful. That in turn will result in a more stale piece, which might not matter in a lot of cases, especially if you’re doing news reporting, but for an in-depth niched wiki page you need to be passionate and interesting in your writing, from start to finish, and the contractor will have to pay for that. In other words, let there be deadlines, but don’t smother the writer.

I could see this line of work being more common as we go along. Mahalo already pays for wiki content, and Google’s Knol (which I’ve written about previously) shares the ad revenue. Content is money, and wikis are on a march. Actually, they have been for quite some time, but I think Wikipedia made everybody scared to enter the market just because they are ad free and so ridiculously big. That didn’t stop Wikipedia hotshot Jimmy Wales to start Wikia though…

Anyway, I think this would be a perfect freelancing gig. Getting paid to learn something I’m somewhat intrigued about, and then write an in-depth piece about it. While I doubt any of today’s players in the wiki sphere will be willing to pay what I’d want for this type of work, I do believe we’ll be seeing more and more ads on various online job boards with a somewhat similar job description.