I'm not a paywall advocate, fwiw. I think it's a suboptimal monetization strategy that often directly conflicts with distribution and UX. That said, I don't think it's ipso facto ridiculous. There are better ways to monetize, but not monetizing is not an option for WSJ.

Unless they use referral page to identify aggregators (Reddit, Digg, HN, etc.) as a specific channel.

For a news website you would hope they do, otherwise their marketing dept isn't doing a very good job.