dpbsmith@verizon.net wrote
Thought number 2: regardless of the legal defensibility of the use of some
other encyclopedia's list of articles as a guideline for shaping Wikipedia's, it strikes me as being intellectually lazy and a bit dishonest.
It's a fair point, but I bet it's a stage other encyclopedias go through, to check that their coverage doesn't have obvious gaps. Which is even more likely to be true at WP, given that no one is actually responsible for anything. As far as I can see we're going to end up with much fresher treatments of most topics - this shouldn't be allowed to impinge, of course, but it's not daft in the context of looking to provide a reference work.
Charles