On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 5:43 PM, David Gerard dgerard@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.