NYMag: “Earlier this week at South by Southwest, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced that the video site will use excerpts from Wikipedia to counteract videos promoting conspiracy theories. This new feature is, at first glance (and really, on second and third glances, too), odd. A megacorporation with billions of dollars and thousands of brilliant employees is … relying on a volunteer-run platform anyone can edit to fact-check information? But the fact that YouTube sees Wikipedia as a reliable source is also, in a sense, a total validation of Wikipedia’s mission. A encyclopedia, open to edits from anyone, could easily have been misused and abused. Instead, it’s become the default place to find facts online. Even Google knows this: When you search for certain things, Google will pull information “snippets” about those terms from Wikipedia. And Wikipedia makes its content free for people to license and reproduce wherever they see fit — including the world’s most powerful search engine. (In a statement, Wikipedia said that it had no problem with YouTube’s decision to use the encyclopedia content — though the video site should definitely have given the encyclopedia some sort of advance notice.)…”