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Wales: ‘Journalists all use Wikipedia’

avatar by Published Nov. 4, 2011 8:22 am Updated Nov. 4, 2011 8:40 am

Foreign Policy
During a visit to Qatar for an education summit, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales told Foreign Policy that he considers the collaborative encyclopedia to be social media, but not a social network. With millions of people relying on Wikipedia, Wales says the question is not whether but how they use it.

Journalists all use Wikipedia. The bad journalist gets in trouble because they use it incorrectly; the good journalist knows it’s a place to get oriented and to find out what questions to ask. … We really look for reliable sources — we’ll say, for example, that just because someone wrote something in a blog somewhere, that doesn’t mean it’s a reliable source. We need to get sources, you know, that are quite old-fashioned about it. We’re looking for good-quality academic journals, books, newspapers, magazines — we’d prefer serious newspapers to tabloid newspapers and those kinds of things.

Related: Wikipedia is the most frequently plagiarized source among students

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  • Anonymous

    This is one journalist who doesn’t use it, and, in a past life as an editorial page editor, I let my interns know that Wikipedia was not a credible source. It’s main flaw? Anybody can edit it. Just as John Seigenthaler what grief Wikipedia caused him and his family. When I’m on online fora and see people citing it as a resource for legal matters, I shake my head.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=504633504 Dan Mitchell

    I use it all the time, and I’m pretty sure I’m not a fool. I would never even consider using it as a direct primary source, since it can be, and often is, edited by morons and people with agendas (who are often the same). But it often presents a decent summation of a given topic and, most importantly, it often includes citations from highly trustworthy news and reference sources. For example, if you’re looking for a particular fact, a Wikipedia article is often the best place to find a pointer to that fact published by a reputable source.

    When you say “most” source citations are by people pushing agendas, you’re either wildly overstating based on limited knowledge, you’re just making stuff up, or you have your own agenda. 

  • http://www.facebook.com/thekohser Gregory Kohs

    Jimmy Wales will stop at nothing to misinform the public about the true nature of Wikipedia.  Even the “sources” present in most Wikipedia articles are often put there with an intent to push the agenda of the Wikipedia editor of the moment.  So, any journalist who uses Wikipedia for any level of research (except, of course, for research about Wikipedia itself) is quite the fool.