QUOTE(Newyorkbrad @ Tue 3rd March 2009, 11:04am)
There is widespread agreement that the increased number of closings and downsizings of conventional newspapers and magazines, largely as a result of the Internet revolution, is a serious issue. I haven't seen a case made that Wikipedia is a major contributor to this particular side effect of increased Web dependency, as contrasted with many of the other negative effects, such as the ones mentioned in my post to the "Online defamation/Slashdot" thread under "General discussion." But as illustrated by the closure of one of the two Denver newspapers last Friday after 150 years, this is a real and ongoing problem, and one with no readily apparent solution.
Let me just say what I said again, so I don't have to argue about all sorts of things I didn't say.
QUOTE(Jon Awbrey @ 30 Jan 2009)
Wikipedia has shown us that a mass medium can be rendered so plastic and so well-leveraged that any part of it can be manipulated by a relatively small number of people, in ways that defy a free society's usual means to guard against it, so long as the special interests in question have a moderate amount of resources and the will to do so. If there are portions of the content that remain untouched, it is for two reasons only: (1) no one has conceived a stake in them yet, (2) virgin forest makes for good cover.
This has nothing to do with the migration of journalism and scholarship into different physical media. It has to do with the undermining of acceptable standards for general information publications — one especially flag-rant example of which eschews the responsibilities that might be incurred by doing so much as calling itself a "publication", as opposed to, say, a "party line".
Hey, pretty good, a triple entendre …
Jon Awbrey