Jimmy Wales speaks with Poynter about AP topic pages

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke with Poynter about the Associated Press’s plan to produce some sort of topics pages for news. This comment from Wales stuck out to me.

People do often come to Wikipedia when major news is breaking. This is not our primary intention, but of course it happens. The reason that it happens is that the traditional news organizations are not doing a good job of filling people in on background information. People come to us because we do a better job at meeting their informational needs.

Wales basically says that the AP should have figured out topic pages years ago to give people background information on the news of the day. They didn’t, and now Wikipedia tops most search results because the online encyclopedia provides context that the AP doesn’t.

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