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