[WikiEN-l] Re: Selecting content of print version

Thu Mar 4 06:25:28 UTC 2004

Charles Matthews wrote:

> <dpbsmith at 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.
>
Actually, it's more than a stage, it's a common business practice. It's 
sometimes called "editing the competition". Everybody checks out what 
their rivals are doing, and so do we.

On the legal side, it's okay to use the competition's material 
internally for comparison purposes, but not to copy and redistribute it. 
The problem for Wikipedia is that we publish *everything*, which means 
that any use of the material on the site itself is potentially copyright 
infringement. Some people seem to believe that we can post things for 
internal use only, when there is no such thing. If individual users want 
to use their personal lists of articles from Columbia or wherever as a 
resource, fine, but don't put that resource up on Wikipedia.

--Michael Snow