Wikipedia, becoming the largest cyber newsroom in the world?

I stumbled across this article on the International Herald Tribune site, which starts as follows:

Imagine a newspaper with more than 2,000 writers, researchers and copy editors, yet no supervisors or managers to speak of. No deadlines; no meetings to plan coverage; no decisions handed down through a chain of command; no getting up on a desk to lead a toast after a job well done.

The article explains how Wikipedia has been an essential news source for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet trying to understand the shootings at Virginia Tech.

And the numbers are impressive:

The Virginia Tech Shooting entry had:

• 2,074 contributors
• more than 140 separate footnotes
• there were more than 750,000 visits to the main article on the shootings in its first two days, an average of four visits a second

This is not the first time Wikipedia has been utilized to such an immense extent, and acted as a primary source of information. The Southeast Asian tsunami in 2004, and the London bombings in 2005 presented Wikipedia not just as an encyclopedia but also as a news source.

I guess there will always be arguments about accuracy, balance, etc., but with such a vast amount of people editing, referencing, cross-checking, and contributing, the entry will host more information than any news article written by a single journalist possible, unless he/she uses Wikipedia as a reference ☺.

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