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August is time for feature stories, and this year's favorite subject is Wikipedia and its founder Jimmy Wales. In the last two weeks, three giants of Old Media have written on this giant of New Media.

  • The New Yorker starts us off with a July story that explores the theory of encyclopedic inclusiveness, the dispute arbitration process on Wikipedia, and article writers such as a seventeen-year-old amateur expert in British peerage. Compares Wales to Billy Crystal. [New Yorker]
  • The Associated Press covers Wales's talk at "Wikimania," a convention for wikiteers, where Wales emphasized quality over quantity — probably a good idea for a site with over a million articles and more errors than the Encyclopedia Britannica (according to a study). [AP on Wired.com]
  • Finally, the New York Times takes the polyphonic approach, writing on "the many voices of Wikipedia, heard in one place." One user tells the Times, "One of the running jokes is that there are better articles on Pokémon than on certain kinds of science. That could be true." I mean, Wikipedia says that's true, but you can't trust that rag, right? [New York Times]