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Something like that is already in place. Over the next few days I'm going to apply my auto-snip tool to reduce the corpus down to a permissible size. That action will be logged in the edit history of each article. The original body will be available to a select few, which may or may not include more than the moderator staff--depending upon how poorly the auto-snip performs (depending how frequently we'll need to re-snip the article, to select a meatier cut.) Auto-snip only grabs the first few significant sentences, and not with much thought at that.

Later tools could be applied (to new posts as well) to select facts... names and dates... to populate some type of search table. Quotes can be extracted as well. And other tools could be written to monitor changes in the source article and report differences automatically.

That sounds perfect for right now, but I believe FreeRepublic should become a regular newspaper that can pay for articles. We could excerpt normally but pay for the really important ones. All this can be spelled out in the posting page. Not everyone would understand, but enough people would get it and most would only post the whole article on the really important ones.

Note: Fundraising idea - Freepers are great writers - can some that are experienced authors write a book about the phenomenon of Free Republic itself and donate the proceeds? I'm sure it would be a best seller!

Interesting point you make about the "writers" at FR.

There are writers of editorials at Free Republic who post their works directly here. There are also some well spoken writers who post their work elsewhere and then initiate a thread with that article here.

More so, we are "all" writers. One of the biggest phenomena that has arisen from Free Republic is the firsthand accounts of history by Freepers. Possibly the most famous example was the discussion of the Space Shuttle Columbia's final voyage. Freepers were discussing observing the flyover right up until the end (as well as discussion of the audio transmissions).

That thread was cited by a number of publications and even excerpted at Democratic Underground. Did ANY of those posters get asked for permission to use their accounts of the event?

There are also the occasions where a breaking news research is made at Free Republic and then gets legs from NewsMax or some other organizations. Sometimes the "credit" is then given to NewsMax or other organizations. Some news organizations would rather cite NewsMax as a source than FreeRepublic.