Mr Fitzgerald said he placed the quote on the website as an experiment when doing research on globalisation.
He wanted to show how journalists use the internet as a primary source and how people are connected especially through the internet, he said. (...)
Fitzgerald was shocked by the result of his experiment.
“I didn’t expect it to go that far. I expected it to be in blogs and sites, but on mainstream quality papers? I was very surprised about,” he said. (...)
Irish Times, 06/05/2009
(...) [Wikipedia], for a few days last week, served as an essential news source for hundreds of thousands of people on the Internet trying to understand the shootings at Virginia Tech University.From the contributions of 2,074 editors, at last count, the site created a polished, detailed article on the massacre, with more than 140 separate footnotes, as well as sidebars that profiled the shooter, Seung-Hui Cho, and gave a timeline of the attacks.According to the foundation that runs the various Wikipedias around the world, 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. (...)