On 27/11/2009, Bod Notbod <bodnot...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Ray Saintonge <sainto...@telus.net> wrote: > >> Certain copyright issues are also at the heart of the problem, notably >> that you can't copyright information. You can copyright expression, but >> Wikipedians are quite happy to not use the actual wording of news >> reports. > > I wonder how true that is, though. I'm sure people on Wikinews do > sometimes cut 'n' paste, but I feel there's more to it than that. > > It actually takes quite a bit of work to read an entire article and > process it in your mind then put out a purely self-made version. And, > let's take the *most* optimistic view of editors: you're still > reporting a report. Some guy went out there, said what he saw, got > money for it, funded by advertising.
Not always, no. Perhaps not even usually. The money often comes from subscriptions, classical example is the BBC. If anything, subscriptions are more reliable; there's less commercial pressure to bend the truth on things. And a lot of the organisations that use advertising pay companies like Reuters for their news, there's only very indirect funding by advertising. And a lot of Rupert Murdoch's money comes from subscriptions also- he charges for satellite and cable access. > At best, all we can do is say "this guy saw what he saw and now I'm > repeating it". A lot of the time, that's all they're saying too; stories frequently aren't by reporters from their organisations. > Don't misunderstand me... I'm still on Wikipedia/Wikinews's side on > this. But that's as a reader and editor, not as someone running a > business. > > Surely it must be true to say that Wikinews would be nothing without > paid journalists from whom we aggregate content? Not absolutely definitely. The Wikipedia doesn't have (m)any paid staff, in the unbelievably unlikely situation that the other news organisations completely disappeared, there's a reasonable chance that Wikinews could fill the gap. We also have other sites like Slashdot and Digg and so forth; these also find and disseminate news. They're not normally as reliable, but they're not *that* bad. In most news organisations, news finds them, not the other way around; and then they have a process that pretty much anyone could do, it's not to do with how they get paid. -- -Ian Woollard _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l