If Wikipedia required Open Access sources, it would be a lot less useful | Wiki Strategies

"Starting in 2008 I wrote a Wikipedia article on a proposed casino, to be built in the Columbia River Gorge. I wrote the article because I believed it was an important topic (and an Oregonian reporter and a Harvard scholar agreed); but according to an argument by Michael Eisen, advanced yesterday in the Ars Technica article 'WikiGate' raises questions about Wikipedia’s commitment to open access, it 'should be difficult' for me to write an article like that. Why? Today, the article I started has 17 footnotes; and in spite of my deep personal commitment to open (freely licensed) content, not a single one of the articles I cited was published under a free license. Many are not even available online without a paid subscription. In other words, none of them is an instance of what’s known as “open access (OA) publishing,” in which the publisher permits republication with minimal copyright restrictions. Is it strange that I should write an article that cites non-OA articles? I don’t think so. In choosing the topic, I — like many Wikipedians — was making a conscious effort to counter what is known as FUTON (FUll Text On the ’Net) bias. I was specifically trying to shed some light on a topic that was opaque to many stakeholders (in this case, the citizens of Oregon and Washington). A great deal of the information about this important topic was unavailable on the open web; my purpose in writing the Wikipedia article was to bring that information out into the open. Indeed, the result — intentionally — was a freely licensed article published on the open web. In other words, an 'open access' article, rooted in non-OA sources ..."