[WikiEN-l] Guardian interview to appear Monday
David Gerard
dgerard at gmail.com
Wed Mar 8 16:09:49 UTC 2006
I just spoke to Natalie Hanman from the Guardian. This is to appear in
Monday's paper, in the 'Office Hours' column in the Media section.
This will be in the paper edition and *may not* be in the online
edition (they tend not to put up the entire Media section).
A reader had written in saying they'd read about Wikipedia's
unreliability and asked if Wikipedia was any good; and she also wanted
to know if it was good for office workers at their desks. I said we
weren't as good as Britannica as yet, but we were better than anything
else on the web, so the more media we get saying how bad we are the
more readers we get ... and office workers don't have the Britannica
on their desk but they *do* have Wikipedia. For usefulness, I pointed
out that as an IT contractor, I use Wikipedia as a reference work
daily. It's fabulous for computer and technical stuff, to quickly get
yourself up to speed on what a piece of jargon is in 60 seconds. And
Nature measured us as equal to Britannica in science. And we were
no.12 in the world on Alexa yesterday, and we've been no.1 reference
site for months now.
So the main message was: we're not Britannica, but we're better than
*anything* else readily available on the web. "We make the Web not
suck." And we're actually good and useful as a reference work *right
now*.
- d.
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