On 14 April 2012 14:31, Martin Poulter <infobomb(a)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/>