[WikiEN-l] NBC's story on Wikipedia

[charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com]

Ray Saintonge wrote

> Slim Virgin wrote:
> 
> >On 3/23/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon at prwatch.org> wrote:

> >>Wikipedia is a big enough topic that it attracts all kinds of
> >>reporters, all kinds of criticism and all kinds of praise. Overall, I
> >>think it has gotten fairly sympathetic press.

> >Yes, indeed, though I sense that's coming to an end.

> Yeah.  The alternative would be for the reporters to learn what putting 
> Wikipedia in proper perspective means.  They might even have to check 
> their facts. That would not be the easy way out for them. :-)

Sheldon is talking good sense, Sarah and Ray are not. The press will print bad-news stories about WP, but that's because such stories are _news_. As David Gerard has just said, the hacks like WP and are well disposed towards us. That doesn't mean they are obliged to make propaganda for WP. If you take open-source software as a comparison, I doubt mainstream journalism has ever had the slightest interest in putting that in "proper perspective". With that as baseline, WP has already done well. A single story about citation in college work probably will have more thoughtful content than you could find about Linux distributions in a month of Sundays.

Charles

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