As a further sign of Wikipedia’s deteriorating status in the press, journalists in the New York Times Business section are not to use Wikipedia to do fact checking, according to a memo posted on Poynter.org:
12/7/2005 10:22:30 AM
From: [New York Times business editor] Larry Ingrassia
To: [Business staff]
Subject: wiki-whatdia?Colleagues,
You probably saw Kit Seelye’s smart Week-in-Review story about inaccurate information in Wikipedia. In case you didn’t, please take a look. Since the story ran, she has received a number of e-mail messages about other inaccurate information on Wikipedia. We shouldn’t be using it to check any information that goes into the newspaper.
Larry
The Times covered the Seigenthaler controversy a number of days ago, in a typically balanced piece, noted,
Wikipedia is now the biggest encyclopedia in the history of the world. As of Friday, it was receiving 2.5 billion page views a month, and offering at least 1,000 articles in 82 languages. The number of articles, already close to two million, is growing by 7 percent a month. And Mr. Wales said that traffic doubles every four months.
