Google News serves up...Wikipedia links
Walesian prophecy fulfilled
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Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales likes to discuss the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit" as some sort of breaking news source. And apparently, Google agrees with him.
As noticed by The New York Times, the world's largest search engine is now including Wikipedia links on Google News, billed as "a computer-generated news site that aggregates headlines from news sources worldwide."
Monday afternoon, for instance, the Google News home page pointed readers to Wikipedia articles on modern-day Iranian martyr Neda Soltani, the recent Taza bombing, Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, and the 2009 flu pandemic.
This would seem to be a permanent change. A company spokeswoman tells The Reg that it began as a test, with Wikipedia articles included on the news site for only a small percentage of users, and in Google's mind, the test went well.
"As with many features on Google News, these links were initially launched as an experiment," she says. "We've rolled out this feature to all English language editions of Google News. From our tests, we've seen that users searching for news find these pages to be helpful supplements to many stories, offering background and reference material on current events."
Google has already used Wikipedia to draw attention away from the mountains of Goobage clogging its main search engine, and in the process, it turned the anyone-can-edit site/online cult into perhaps the world's most dominant information source.
Now the search giant is playing into the hands of Jimbo Wales yet again, while making a mockery of the legitimate news sources it so recently vowed to protect.
It's no secret that in allowing anyone to edit its pages, Wikipedia has a certain knack for disseminating nonsense. In January, for instance, the day of President Obama's inauguration, longtime US Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd turned up dead in Wikiland - even though they were still among the living in our world.
But for Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner, this is all part of Wikipedia's role as a, well, news source.
In a recent interview, Gardner said that she was "quite comfortable" with mistakes on the site, and she sought to defend her argument by calling Wikipedia "just another mainstream news medium," echoing the words of Wales, Wikipedia self-described Spiritual Leader. "I know that more or less the same mistakes can be found in the New York Times," she said.
The difference, of course, is that The New York Times doesn't let any anonymous shut-in edit its pages, and barring a few exceptions, it doesn't allow the sort of info hoax that makes Wikiland such an amusing place to visit.
In the wake of the Byrd and Kennedy Wikinonsense, Jimbo ordered the site's IT staff to roll out a new Wikitool designed to suppress site "vandalism." With "Flagged Revisions," certain edits wouldn't be shown to the public unless they were approved by "trusted editors." He ruled out a complete lock-down on articles because that would kill the site's knack for, yes, news.
It's unclear why those anonymous volunteers should be trusted. But whether they can or not, the Flagged Revisions idea was put on hold. Many Wikifiddlers believe such a change would somehow undermine the site's commitment to the tenets of Web 2.0. They continue to discuss the idea in Wikiland, and it may be revived as early as August.
Part of the problem is that Wikipedia can't quite decide what it wants to be. Encyclopedia? News medium? Unfettered nonsense? But regardless, Google sees it as a trusted source of information. That's nothing new. ®
COMMENTS
Regular news isn't authoritative either
Yeah, Wikipedia isn't authoritative, the accuracy is random, and the editorial process isn't as deep as the New York Times's, but think about the last time you were at a newsworthy event and compared the press reports with what you saw for yourself. If the news-reading public was lucky, the reporter actually had some understanding of the topic (that's often not true about technology or science or war or world politics, but reporters are often perceptive even if they're not knowledgeable.)
A big part of a news editor's job is to make sure the reporting covers stories that are interesting, where interesting is usually defined as "sells newspapers or attracts viewers/listeners". In some news sources, that means making sure that the story is accurate; in some it means making sure that the story matches the correct political slant or artistic preferences. We'll see if including Wikipedia gets Google enough interestingness.
Wikipedia articles are fairly good about accuracy, because they're usually written by people who care about the topic they're writing about and may even know something. Occasionally you get, say, news about elephants and Stephen Colbert, but even that's still somewhere on the accuracy scale between Fox News and the Weekly World News.
@LaeMi Qian
You've got it spot on. As a general overview for 'stuff' it's hard to beat Wikipedia but if you're talking specific and accurate information, forget it.
Still, Wikipedia does have a point. In London commuters get the choice of one morning and two evening free papers. They are, without exception, complete crap. The quality of journalism is non-existent, aimed at the lowest common denominator. Why should free Wikipedia be any better (or worse)?
Mine's the one with the FT in the pocket - because it's the only paper I've found that doesn't seem to be written by journotards.
Wikipedia: the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for the whole world?
Just wait until the corporations and power-mad bureaucrats bring Wikipedia under their control!
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