[WikiEN-l] Google Starts Including Wikipedia on Its News Site

[Steve Summit]

>> "So, in essence, many Wikipedia articles are another way that the work
>> of news publications is quickly condensed and reused without
>> compensation."
>>
>> What the fuck. Is there a journalist in the last four years who hasn't
>> used Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder?
>
> Journalists use each other's work all the time without, as far as I
> know, paying each other anything. It's a completely ridiculous
> complaint.

I didn't read it as a complaint; more of a rueful acknowledgement.
(As Charles Matthews has already pointed out, it's factually
quite accurate.)

Rightly or wrongly, journalism is widely viewed as being a dying
industry if not a downright dinosaur.  And if the journalists
(and the journals) all disappear, we're going to be hurting for
reliable sources, so if it's a problem, it's our problem, too.

I'm not saying we're doing anything wrong, any more than Google
News is doing anything wrong.  But as Zachary Seward has
described [1], we're viewed (by Google itself) as one of the
web-2.0-ey things that will displace conventional journalism.

This isn't the place to debate how conventional journalism
can rescue itself (or where the new niche for investigative
journalists will be), but it's a pretty interesting question.

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/google-news-experimenting-with-links-to-wikipedia-on-its-homepage/