Quoting geni geniice@gmail.com:

On 11/12/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:

...

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/astronomers-ten.html

The scientists recommends Wikipedia to the journalist for backup of what he's saying - because we have the references listed and in place.

When citeing journals wikipedia seems to favor high impact journals to a slightly higher degree than the general scientific community.

There are a variety of reasons for that. First, lay people are more likely to be aware of high impact journals. We've all heard of Nature for example. Second, high impact journals are more likely to be easily accessible. Many Wikipedians edit from libraries or universities and those institutions will be more likely to subscribe to high impact journals. Third, high impact journals have higher search engine rankings so if one is looking for a source for something and does a google search it will more likely turn up a high impact journal.

On 12/12/2007, Andrew Gray shimgray@gmail.com wrote:

I sure how this is directly relevant, or indeed how it's measure at all,

Like this:

http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_8/nielsen/index.html

but it's entirely unsurprising - we're writing for a more general, more popular audience, and thus are less likely to delve into the more obscure works. The nature of the high-impact journals is that the work published in them is usually among the most prominent in its field...

I would tend to credit it to different use patterns. When an article appears in a high impact journal people may read the journal then go and add the info to wikipedia. For lower level journals they are going to picked up more randomly as people go looking for a cite of a given bit of information.