[WikiEN-l] Google thinks Wikipedia is a news source

[Carcharoth]

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 5:00 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/6/7 Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>:
>>
>>>
>>> Unfortunate but unsurprising. Not that long ago Google was telling
>>> traditional media that they should construct their articles in a more
>>> wikipedia like manner (ie continuously update a single article per
>>> event rather than creating a string of new articles).
>>>
>>> --
>>> geni
>>>
>>
>> The New York Times does that with breaking news. It is a better practice
>> even if it is only a few reporters and editors that are involved.
>
> The BBC News website does too. I'm not a great fan of that approach,
> it makes it hard to find out what the new information is (they don't
> have "(diff)" links like Wikipedia, so you have to play a game of
> spot-the-difference manually).

That is annoying. Especially if you link to or quote from a news
article and find it has been updated later. I can't remember if they
update the URL as well. The other problem is that some news sources
(can't remember what the BBC do) only give the "latest update" date
and time. So you are sometimes left in the dark as to when the *first*
version of the news story was published. Which can sometimes be vital
information for a reader. This is even more annoying if a story was
published weeks or days ago, and then suddenly the only visible date
on the story is today's date. It's like, uh, I linked to this page,
giving the original date of publication of the story, and now you've
trashed the page and changed the date. Epic fail.

And don't get me started on webpages or "news" stories that fail to
give *any* date of publication at all. If you are lucky, you get a
generic copyright date at the bottom of the page, which usually bears
no relation to when the page was initially published or last updated.

Carcharoth