Jeff Kinz wrote:
I haven't done any comparisons for "leadership" press use of citations. For example it will probably be a long time before the NY Times, or the Washington Post are willing to cite WP rather than EB in any articles.
Having followed this closely for some time, but without crunching numbers in the same fashion, my anecdotal observation is that citations to Wikipedia are increasingly penetrating leading news media. Early on, it came more from smaller, local media. The bigger fish have gradually joined in, usually starting with specialty topics where we clearly perform better (does Britannica have an article on podcasting yet?). By now, I think one of the major papers in just about every large American city has cited Wikipedia as a source, and not just via recycled wire copy. With the current cycle of cuts in personnel, which will probably hit hard in terms of resources devoted to background research, I expect the scope and volume of Wikipedia citations to increase further.
One publication, "the Jurist" has appeared relatively recently and is probably the source of about half (or more) of the recent WP cite counts. It may be necessary to eliminate them from future counts since their extremely high rate of WP cites are not a normal pattern for a news publication. Of course "the Jurist" is not a normal news publication anyway. I'm surprised Google indexes them for Google news. Well, its a reputable publication anyway. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/
Within the realm of what Google News does, which includes a lot of specialty news, the Jurist site certainly qualifies and their inclusion is not that surprising. They are one of the first to make a systematic rather than occasional habit of linking to Wikipedia articles for background information, but I expect to see more places adopt this practice in the future.
--Michael Snow
On 9/22/05, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Jeff Kinz wrote:
I haven't done any comparisons for "leadership" press use of citations. For example it will probably be a long time before the NY Times, or the Washington Post are willing to cite WP rather than EB in any articles.
Having followed this closely for some time, but without crunching numbers in the same fashion, my anecdotal observation is that citations to Wikipedia are increasingly penetrating leading news media. Early on, it came more from smaller, local media. The bigger fish have gradually joined in, usually starting with specialty topics where we clearly perform better (does Britannica have an article on podcasting yet?). By now, I think one of the major papers in just about every large American city has cited Wikipedia as a source, and not just via recycled wire copy. With the current cycle of cuts in personnel, which will probably hit hard in terms of resources devoted to background research, I expect the scope and volume of Wikipedia citations to increase further.
I did a paper related to this last year, and back then UK and Australian newspapers embraced Wikipedia much more than American news sites - Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Sydney Morning Herald.
Might also be useful to compare the results against lists we maintain, like at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_press_source_2004 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_as_a_press_source_2005
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
One publication, "the Jurist" has appeared relatively recently and is probably the source of about half (or more) of the recent WP cite counts. It may be necessary to eliminate them from future counts since their extremely high rate of WP cites are not a normal pattern for a news publication. Of course "the Jurist" is not a normal news publication anyway. I'm surprised Google indexes them for Google news. Well, its a reputable publication anyway. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/
Within the realm of what Google News does, which includes a lot of specialty news, the Jurist site certainly qualifies and their inclusion is not that surprising. They are one of the first to make a systematic rather than occasional habit of linking to Wikipedia articles for background information, but I expect to see more places adopt this practice in the future.
--Michael Snow _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l