What you're referring to is known as the "Overjustification Effect". Essentially, when you offer a reward or payment for something that a person was originally willing to do for free, you shift their motivations completely.
Rather than sticking with the intrinsic reasons such as providing knowledge for the good of mankind, making sure everything is up to date and correct, or imparting wisdom upon their "lessers", you've now forced them to focus their motivations on the extrinsic reason which is the reward. This has two very fatal flaws:
1) Quality - Laugh if you will, but there are reputable people still contributing to Wikipedia. Doctors, Lawyers, Mathematicians, Scientists, etc. These people are highly paid within their field and donating time because they find it interesting or noble. Start offering them money and it'll just be a pathetically miniscule sum compared to their salaries and likely turn them off from the whole deal.
2) Quantity - If you think NPOV is bad enough as it is, just wait until Wikipedia actually has to PAY for each article addition. Suddenly every single article choice will be scrutinized. "What's this 'Naruto', why would anyone care about it?" This sort of scrutinization and heavy handed interference is likely to kill off plenty of good articles before they even get started and the obscure wealth of articles on Wikipedia are what make it valuable.
tl;dr: OP is right.