[WikiEN-l] BBC blog on WSJ study

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Nov 27, 2009 at 12:13 PM, Durova <nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
> It's hard to understand the conjecture that Wikipedia ties in with those
> plans.  If anything, Wikipedia's habit of referencing historic news articles
> would help Mr. Murdoch's bottom line because it sends traffic to old
> articles, which can generate advertising revenue from old news that would
> otherwise be valueless.

You could say the same thing about goggle search, yet some of these
organizations are claiming that google search is ripping them off
for linking to them (and not just the google news headline scraping).

It's complicated. The advertising income these kinds of sites get
is strongly driven by keeping users within their garden. When someone
pops into their site grabs only the information they need the paper
makes a lot less money then if the users hang out. Compare to the
standard grocer's practice of putting common goods (like milk) at
the back of the store.

I was told by a journalist that this is also why they don't link to
sources and citations. I.e. "Foo releases revolutionary new paper on
Bar"… and it's available online but mainstream news will almost never
link to it. It I don't know if it's true, but it seems consistent.

In that context it's easy to see why these organizations see Wikipedia
as a clear threat to their business model:

(1) The re-synthesis of information that goes into creating Wikipedia
articles often reduces/removes the need to read source news articles,
without infringing copyright.  The kind of neutral analysis and
synthesis that Wikipedia does (when its working right) is one of the
things people used to go to news outlets for.

(2) When people do follow the links from Wikipedia its often just for
a quick check to exactly what they want.  I'd speculate Wikipedia is
less likely to have a misleading link than a machine generated search
result. I'd expect readers to head back over to Wikipedia: It's a much
better place to be to find out more than a typical newspaper site.

(3)  A lot of the traditional media has been fighting against the
increasing expectation that useful information will be available
for free using the argument that it is a fundamental truth that
someone has to pay for it, so if we are not all paying for the paper
then there is no way that we'll get the services a newspaper
journalist provides.  I don't think the existence of Wikipedia
refutes this position completely, but it makes the argument much more
difficult and complicated.

(Ever wonder why newspapers articles are so frequently centred on
reporting on the (in)accuracy of Wikipedia, when thats long since
stopped being news and when there are thousands of other interesting
stories to tell about Wikipedia?  I think that happens because
Wikipedia being free somewhat comprehensive and good is aspect of
Wikipedia which is the most fundamentally incompatible with the
thinking of people in that business. What we're doing is intuitive
to people who have worked in Free Software; but it's deeply strange
that it works at all to someone in the news business)

I'm not completely sure how this all relates to this BBC blog entry…

But in any case, there is nothing successful which is so boring that
no one feels deeply threatened by it.