>> "So, in essence, many Wikipedia articles are another way that the work >> of news publications is quickly condensed and reused without >> compensation." >> >> What the fuck. Is there a journalist in the last four years who hasn't >> used Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder? > > Journalists use each other's work all the time without, as far as I > know, paying each other anything. It's a completely ridiculous > complaint.
I didn't read it as a complaint; more of a rueful acknowledgement. (As Charles Matthews has already pointed out, it's factually quite accurate.) Rightly or wrongly, journalism is widely viewed as being a dying industry if not a downright dinosaur. And if the journalists (and the journals) all disappear, we're going to be hurting for reliable sources, so if it's a problem, it's our problem, too. I'm not saying we're doing anything wrong, any more than Google News is doing anything wrong. But as Zachary Seward has described [1], we're viewed (by Google itself) as one of the web-2.0-ey things that will displace conventional journalism. This isn't the place to debate how conventional journalism can rescue itself (or where the new niche for investigative journalists will be), but it's a pretty interesting question. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/google-news-experimenting-with-links-to-wikipedia-on-its-homepage/ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
