Just now, minutes after the WSJ sent out an alert about the George Mitchell baseball drug report, someone put up a list of the players names on Wikipedia. I saw it on public Twitter while randomly visiting the public page there.
Wow. How can a newspaper hope to compete with that? And why wouldn't a newspaper, to save effort, simply -- assuming the list is accurate -- link to it? Journalistically, I can see the rationale of wanting to control the accuracy and therefore keep it on the newspaper's site. There will be tons of lists in tons of publications (hats off to any that add value). ... But, the speed of the list by what seemed to be a private individual, and on Wikipedia to allow other fervent folks to correct it - that's something that proves the power of community and individuals. (And one more caveat: I'll bet you that some Web editors -- you know who you are! -- will copy and paste that list without saying they did so.)
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