Might be hard to compare Wikipedia and Google. I’d guess more people use Google, but Wikipedia is more invasive. Regardless, it is certainly highly effective.
I think for media coverage, it would have been Wikipedia. Journalists joke about students left stranded without Wikipedia for their homework … but as far as I can tell, they’re almost all utterly reliant on Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. They’re feeling its absence keenly. (And crying with relief when they realise it still works on their phones.) The news cycle started as soon as the warning banner went up yesterday.
They say so speaking to them (they used to say so a lot, when it was a novelty—say, 2005-2008), and I get the impression from stories that seem to have been backgrounded from Wikipedia. (Which is admittedly subjective rather than statistics. But when you recognise the Wikipedia writing style …) I suspect this is a lot of why Wikipedia gets a really easy ride from the press.
Might be hard to compare Wikipedia and Google. I’d guess more people use Google, but Wikipedia is more invasive. Regardless, it is certainly highly effective.
I think for media coverage, it would have been Wikipedia. Journalists joke about students left stranded without Wikipedia for their homework … but as far as I can tell, they’re almost all utterly reliant on Wikipedia as their handy universal backgrounder. They’re feeling its absence keenly. (And crying with relief when they realise it still works on their phones.) The news cycle started as soon as the warning banner went up yesterday.
How far can you tell?
They say so speaking to them (they used to say so a lot, when it was a novelty—say, 2005-2008), and I get the impression from stories that seem to have been backgrounded from Wikipedia. (Which is admittedly subjective rather than statistics. But when you recognise the Wikipedia writing style …) I suspect this is a lot of why Wikipedia gets a really easy ride from the press.