[WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Bod Notbod]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:43 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>> As I say, I love Wikipedia, but putting on media boots I can see us as
>> a problem.
>
> This doesn't mean their opinion has a leg to stand on, however.
>
> We do this stuff so people can use it, but it's a bit off to turn
> around and claim we should be paying them for the privilege.

There is a page on Wikipedia giving advice on how to "refactor" the
info we get from elsewhere. I can't recall the page now.

In practice I think it's *very* hard not to steal a line. I think
we've all had the experience of being set homework at school and
looking it up in an encyclopedia and then shifting the words around to
make it look different.

I would suggest (whilst still being an avid Wikipedian) that our
articles will often be a form of finding stuff that could conceivably
have monetary value and then spurting it out for free.

Again, I love that we do that. But I do have an unsettling feeling.
Some moral qualms.