An author, as opposed to just someone who has written something, is someone whose writings people are willing to pay for. In the original post's discussion of

An author, as opposed to just someone who has written something, is someone whose writings people are willing to pay for. In the original post's discussion of Wikipedia, for example, there is no authorship involved, and I for one would not be willing to pay anything for access to Wikipedia. It is convenient when I am online, sometimes, but to me it is not worth spending any of my resources on. On the other hand, I have thousands of books, all of which I have spent money and time acquiring, every one of which has a known author or authors that produced the work.