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.