San Francisco — Acknowledging that Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia is greatly admired by the public as a news source, the world’s biggest search engine Google, has now started including Wikipedia links on its Google News service, among the stable of publications it trawls to create the site.
So now, in addition to the global or categorical news links, Wikipedia reference links will be tagged along. A visit to the Google News home page, for instance, revealed that four out of 30 or so articles summarized there had prominent links to Wikipedia articles, including ones covering the global swine flu pandemic and articles on modern-day Iranian election demonstration and articles on martyr Neda Soltani, the recent Taza bombing, Craigslist killer Philip Markoff, and the 2009 flu pandemic.
The inclusion of Wikipedia articles along with thousands of publications used by Google News comes in to force as an experiment that was seen by a small percentage of users, said a company spokesman, Gabriel Stricker. Before making the addition permanent, he said, Google wanted to be sure that even people seeking news would want to read the articles created by volunteers working in collaboration over the Internet.
“We saw users were finding the Wikipedia pages to be helpful complements to so many stories they saw,” he said, adding that Wikipedia frequently offered “the broader overview on the topic.”
Zachary Seward of Nieman Journalism Lab discovered this inclusion to Google News earlier this month. Googles’ Stricker, informed him via email that — “Currently, we re showing a small number of users links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events. Including Wikipedia articles would be like a short cut to a particular topic that a user might be unaware of for instance, H1N1 virus.”
“As with many features on Google News, these links were initially launched as an experiment,” she says. “We have unfolded this feature to all English language editions of Google News. From our tests, we have 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’s publicity of Wikipedia content is hardly new: the search giant routinely lists Wikipedia articles as the first result for a search. But their use on the news site – especially as newspaper publishers have been complaining that Google was building a competing news site using headlines and snippets of newspaper articles, adds a new wrinkle to the question of how publications can control and charge for their content.
In fact the issue arises here is that Wikipedia articles are voluntarily contributed and edited by several readers who wish to add or correct something on a particular topic. So typically, its a user generated content meant of users. However, when it comes to quoting news-based information, Wikipedia articles are written directly on the facts reported by news agencies with several footnotes merely acknowledging the news story source.
Now the search giant is dancing to the tunes of Jimmy Wales yet again, while making a mockery of the legitimate news sources it so recently vowed to protect.
The move by Google News was news to Wikipedia itself. Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, said he learned about it by reading an online item on the subject by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
“Google is acknowledging that Wikipedia is becoming a source for very up-to-date information,” he said, although “it is an encyclopedia at the end of the day.”