[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

[Fastfission]

On 9/20/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> > I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
> > everything.  I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
> > news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover.  The
> > solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
> > events more.  I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
> > periods!  Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
> > events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
> > kidnappings?  What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
> > minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
> > cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.?  It's all good info we're missing!
> >
> Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering
> your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick
> way to scan that.

Actually ProQuest has massive microfilm newspaper databases which are
fulltext searchable that would fit the bill (the entire contents of
the NY Times, Wash Post, LA Times, Chicago Trib, etc. which go back to
the 1840s in some cases) as well as the American Periodicals Series
which goes back to 1740. It's out there, though it helps to have an
institutional account to get access to it.

FF