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

[David Gerard]

On 21/09/06, Fastfission <fastfission at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
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