As a guy who runs a news site about a band that gives me exclusive news, I've been whining about this for a dozen years now. I've been ripped off by MTV, Spin, Rolling Stone, NME, Kerrang!, you name it. A friend of mine was at one point almost wholly responsible for the Wikipedia article on Nine Inch Nails, and related tales of seeing his writing in publications worldwide.
In my experience, I've seen things improve - at least in the realm of music news. I assume it's because music-related news outlets are hiring people who got their start blogging, and who have a better appreciation for citing and linking to your sources. I think it's going to take a while for this trend to seep into more 'serious' 'journalistic' organizations, but it's definitely getting better.
Your friend (or you, not sure if you mean your friend is complaining) understands that once he writes content into a Wikipedia article he agrees to give away the contents of his work to the public right? That's the whole point of Wikipedia. Your friend doesn't deserve credit, Wikipedia does.
Of course he does. I think it would be quite a task to bring a Wikipedia Article up to "featured article" status and not understand such a basic fact about Wikipedia. I suppose my inclusion of that bit was more about the oddity of seeing things you wrote, copied verbatim into hundreds of magazines, newspapers, and online articles. I think that when we discussed this, his point was also that Wikipedia was not credited.
The web was built for referential text. It's one of the basic concepts of "Hypertext" - that it's 2012 and so-called journalists fail to use this simple process to give credit where it's due is kind of sad.
Want to apologize for that last sentence since I wrote it after feeling sick in the middle of the night. After I reread it when I woke up it sounded pretty rude.
Not that he should or shouldn't deserve credit for editing but in the end Wikipedia should be the one cited. I would suggest that Wikipedia acknowledge some editors for their work but that to me would probably result in more bureaucracy and infighting than any good it would do acknowledging contributing editors.
But I agree, very sad when a big site doesn't cite their sources even if it was, "an email from a friend"
In my experience, I've seen things improve - at least in the realm of music news. I assume it's because music-related news outlets are hiring people who got their start blogging, and who have a better appreciation for citing and linking to your sources. I think it's going to take a while for this trend to seep into more 'serious' 'journalistic' organizations, but it's definitely getting better.