FYI, FWIW, YMMV:

The "credibility battle" has a distinct trendline:

Since November 2004 I've been capturing two automated news feeds generated by Google News alerts on citations of the Wikipedia and "that other encyclopedia"(E. Britannica).

As the items dribbled in, I eliminated those which were "about" the 'pedias and kept those which "cited" the pedias. **

Here are the results :

From 11/7/2004 to 9/21/2004, citations appearing in an arbitrarily

selected group of news publications [Pubs indexed by Google News] count as follows:***

Wikipedia: 412 ****

Encyclopedia Britannica: 73

Ratio of roughly 5.6 to 1. Call it 11 to 2 for integer only CPU's :)

WP is leading handsomely.

This is a crude measure. A more meaningful analysis would have to analyze the "status" of which pubs were citing and how often etc...

I may follow up with some of that if someone gives me a carrot...

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.

If anyone wants to examine the collection of Google alerts just let me know.*****

** There is some double counting as some of the alerts contained multiple items which could be either a citation or an article "about" "some"pedia. Since the keep/delete selection has to be made on the entire alert transmission (an email) some "abouts" may be counted as cites. Since it occurs for both it balances out to some extent.

*** Some of the citations referenced very early versions of the EB, like 1853!

**** 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/

***** No, I don't really have a thing for footnotes, just thought I'd do it this once.

Distribute as desired.