[WikiEN-l] Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site

[Nathan]

On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 12:17 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 2009/6/22 Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com>:
>
> > DG, lighten up on Noam Cohen a bit - he seems more disposed to be fair
> > to us than when I met him in Taipei in 2007, and seemed surprised that
> > any Wikipedians were actually, like, serious.  His point was factual
> > even if you may think it is misdirection.
>
>
> I took it as a direct message of his employer's stance. It's 100%
> indicative of the industry stance. Have you seen this *batshit insane*
> bullshit? (forwarded to me by Mike Peel):
>
>
> - d.
>

I wouldn't take it to indicate the stance of the New York Times as a
company; even if it were Bill Keller writing the article, it wouldn't
necessarily represent the corporate position. Cohen is just a reporter, not
spokesman for NYT Inc.

And it isn't so terribly unreasonable, the idea that news aggregators (who
collate content, rather than create it) should be asked to pay some portion
of their revenue to the folks who actually do the work. Our role is a bit
different, since we combine a broad range of references into representative,
but cohesive and unique, coverage of a topic. Google and other sites just
pull links - the most they might do is write an introductory blurb of about
a sentence. I don't personally see that as much different than a normal
search engine function, but I can see where the news people are coming from
on this one.

Nathan