[WikiEN-l] Re: WP Credibility watch: stats of WP and EB citations in news press:

Thu Sep 22 02:54:27 UTC 2005

Jeff Kinz wrote:

>>I haven't done any comparisons for "leadership" press use of citations.
>>For example it will probably be a long time before the NY Times, or the
>>Washington Post are willing to cite WP rather than EB in any articles.
>>    
>>
Having followed this closely for some time, but without crunching 
numbers in the same fashion, my anecdotal observation is that citations 
to Wikipedia are increasingly penetrating leading news media. Early on, 
it came more from smaller, local media. The bigger fish have gradually 
joined in, usually starting with specialty topics where we clearly 
perform better (does Britannica have an article on podcasting yet?). By 
now, I think one of the major papers in just about every large American 
city has cited Wikipedia as a source, and not just via recycled wire 
copy. With the current cycle of cuts in personnel, which will probably 
hit hard in terms of resources devoted to background research, I expect 
the scope and volume of Wikipedia citations to increase further.

>>One publication, "the Jurist" has appeared relatively recently and is
>>probably the source of about half (or more) of the recent WP cite counts.
>>It may be necessary to eliminate them from future counts since their
>>extremely high rate of WP cites are not a normal pattern for a news
>>publication. Of course "the Jurist" is not a normal news publication
>>anyway. I'm surprised Google indexes them for Google news. Well, its a
>>reputable publication anyway.
>>http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/
>>    
>>
Within the realm of what Google News does, which includes a lot of 
specialty news, the Jurist site certainly qualifies and their inclusion 
is not that surprising. They are one of the first to make a systematic 
rather than occasional habit of linking to Wikipedia articles for 
background information, but I expect to see more places adopt this 
practice in the future.

--Michael Snow