On 14 April 2012 14:31, Martin Poulter <infob...@gmail.com> wrote: > We had a criticism last year at one of our events that by making text > freely available we are undermining the employability of the > journalists and authors who would otherwise have written those > paragraphs about composers, musicians or species. We should (and > generally do) confront this head-on and make it a central part of our > messaging about our public benefit: Wikimedia UK's activities are not > just improving Wikimedia sites, but other big-name sites such as the > BBC's. We're saving licence-fee money by making it relatively cheap > for the BBC to have comprehensive web sites about music and about > nature. And so on.
I would suggest that the critique rests on a highly questionable assumption, namely that if Wikipedia were not there people would pay journalists to write the stuff that Wikipedia provides. Given that when I'm creating new articles about topics, there's often a real shortage of sources by the paid writers and journalists and I often have to delve far into obscure archives to locate such sources, the whole critique is ridiculous: Wikipedia is providing articles on topics journalists and other paid writers never talk about because there is no commercial market for material on that topic. The criticism cuts both ways: there being a well-sourced Wikipedia article on a topic means that traffic goes to the newspapers and other places that are used as sources. For commercial sites, that means page views, which means money, which means they can continue commissioning new work. With the BBC pages, tying into DBpedia and other linked data sources makes perfect sense: it means they don't have to maintain a complex database of topics but just link up to existing ones on the web. -- Tom Morris <http://tommorris.org/> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org
