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

[Charles Matthews]

Nathan wrote
>
> 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.
>   
It's certainly not reasonable to ask anyone to pay to link to your 
webpage. If you don't think people should be able to link freely to your 
content, don't put it on the Web.

Of course it's economics telling here, and the fact that newspapers 
weren't smart enough to set up a cartel a decade or more ago, so that 
online news would be subscriber-only.

Charles