[WikiEN-l] The London Review of Books on Wikipedia

[Sage Ross]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Charles
Matthews<charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> "... encyclopedias have been made better by the advent of the internet,
> but newspapers have been made worse: the cumulative impact of the
> readers’ comments that can now be appended online to almost any article
> tends to diminish most forms of human understanding."
>
> Worth reading for that insight alone.

I don't buy the premise that reader comments have much, if anything,
to do with newspaper woes.  The internet has thrown newspapers'
business model under the bus, but reader comments and other forms of
participation have mostly been good developments.  Major newspapers
have bigger audiences than they ever had even while ad revenue
declines, and they have generally been late on the bandwagon for
allowing reader comments.  At New York Times, for instance, there
still aren't comments on regular news articles and comments on
editorials and op-eds are (as of pretty recently) curated, meaning
that editors can identify and highlight the most insightful comments.

The decline in newspaper quality also started well before the Internet
became ubiquitous and had more to do with business-minded editorial
decisions than anything else.