Why is the BBC using Wikipedia as a source for artist biographies?
We know that many people using our website would like to find out more about artists, and basic biographical information is one of the key things that people expect to find on our pages. We feel that we provide best value to the licence fee payer by concentrating our resources on providing great original content (mainly through broadcast) and making it easy to find that content on the web. Biographies are a standardised type of content that are expected across thousands of artists. Wikipedia offers good quality biographies with very good coverage across artists. There are two good reasons to use this content rather than recreating similar content in-house or sourcing it from a commercial supplier: • It’s available under the GNU Free Documentation Licence, which means not only is there no licensing cost to the licence-fee payer for this text, but it is freely available to all our users to use and share in turn. • It’s editable by anyone. This may seem like a mixed blessing, but the enti
