The Daily Show
Wikipedia's blackout to protest SOPA forced Jon Stewart to learn about the legislation another way: "With Wikipedia down, I had no choice but to turn to a notoriously unreliable source: the news," he said, grimacing. || Related: 8 million people used Wikipedia's tool to look up contact information for their elected officials (Techdirt) | TV news shows spotty about disclosing parent companies' support of SOPA (The New York Times) | SOPA proponents launch TV, radio print ad campaign (Adweek) | Dilbert creator Scott Adams writes, "I have one of the most widely stolen intellectual properties in the history of the world. Emotionally, I'm okay with that. It feels like a compliment. Financially, I have no idea if piracy has hurt me in any meaningful way."

Despite jokes about Wikipedia's SOPA blackout being tough on high school students, the site is an important reference for journalists working on deadline. USC Annenberg journalism professor Andrew Lih offered a couple of blackout workarounds during a BlogTalkRadio show hosted by the Columbia journalism school: (more...)

The Independent | BBC
People at the British public relations firm Bell Pottinger altered Wikipedia entries to remove negative information and add positive statements about the firm's clients. Wikipedia has suspended 10 user accounts, and volunteers are going through the entries to see what was changed. Among the changes, according to The Independent: removing references to one man's drug conviction and another's arrest for bribery. "Bell Pottinger behaved unethically and broke several Wikipedia rules in doing so," tweeted Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, although a company representative said the company's actions were above-board.

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