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.

Possibly Related

• Freelance Friday: What I’ve Been Writing Week 32
• Mahalo’s got good taste

• Cymbolism: An Interview with Mubashar Iqbal can be found over at Devlounge
• Gawker Media Takes a Pop at Los Angeles Times’ Record Month over at The Blog Herald
• Teens in Tech, the WordPress.com for Teens over at The Blog Herald
• Blogger.com Marks Blogs as Spam, Unmarks Them over at The Blog Herald
• The Blog Herald Relaunches over at The Blog Herald, see my design post as well
• Integrating and Customizing Lijit for Your Site is my first tutorial over at Nettuts

I’ve been twittering as well, of course. This week, I haven’t been all that active on the Hive forums, still easing back from the summer pace I guess. That’s it for the week. Stay tuned for a fiction update this weekend!

Possibly Related

• Freelance Friday: My Writing Week 3
• Freelance Friday: My Writing Week 36
• Freelance Friday: My Writing Week 52
• Freelance Friday: My Writing Week 51
• Freelance Friday: My Writing Week 48