> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.

Its not, really, for something that by-mission is a tertiary source. There's probably a different set of rules that ought to be in place for a publicly-contributed-to Wikijournal of Original Research (which, once it established itself as credible, could be a source cited in Wikipedia), but that's a different niche. Wikipedia does not intend to be all things to all people, it intends to be one thing and do it well.

> Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained.

> Another issue with press coverage is "established" media is contracting.

"Third-party" and "press" aren't the same thing. Wikipedia, by policy, prefers academic and peer-reviewed publications.

News media publications are one of many other things that might be reliable sources in particular areas, but are not especially preferred.

> Meanwhile, the number of self-published, user-generated sources of expert opinion is exploding. I'm talking about blogs and places like Hacker News and Reddit. Someone with deep experience and understanding of a topic can share information, yet this information can't be used, according to Wikipedia's policies.

It actually can, per Wikipedia policy, if the author of the self-published source also has other work in the relevant field published in reliable, third-party publications.

> Because "substantial third-party coverage" is a flawed test for the importance of a subject.

So what? Importance of a subject is not what WP is trying to filter. Wikipedia wants to contain all the important knowledge, yes, but that's impossible to measure or agree on, so there is a set of criteria that act as a reasonable proxy, and you need to accept that the Wikipedia we've got is the one that has those filters.

So it goes something like this: content in wikipedia should be "NPOV", it should not be original research (i.e. WP aims to be a tertiary source), and content should be "verifiable". These terms in turn need to be refined, defined, given guidelines, etc. (For example, nothing is truly NPOV, so we need a way to understand how to approximate it, and for example, not all verification is equal (and nothing is perfectly verifiable), so we need guidelines again.)

And, as sibling comments have pointed out, there is NOT a preference for "press coverage" and "established media". It's one permitted alternative.

> "expert opinion ... like Hacker News and Reddit"

I assume that you were joking, or making some nuanced point that I missed, but just in case you weren't...

Listen, they let ME write comments on Hacker News and Reddit, you know. They also let experts write at such places, it's true, but how will you know the difference? Yes, there's lots of expert opinion in the world, including e.g. some on HN, but so what? Citations aren't any good if they don't bring some kind of authority, and "some guy said so on HN" is not very convincing.

There are certainly circumstances in which a comment on HN can qualify for WP:RELIABLESOURCES .

There's lots of good reading at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About , but if you're trying to "get something done" today, it's too much to read at one sitting. You've gotta just accept that, but then again you shouldn't be trying to "get something done" on wikipedia in a given day.

I agree press coverage is suboptimal. But really, press coverage is one of the lower tiers of "reliable source" from Wikipedia's perspective, and cautiously included for mostly pragmatic reasons. Ideally, articles shouldn't be based on press coverage: if you're writing an article about the history of IBM, or about World War I, you should base it on one of the many books or journal articles on the subject, not on digging up some old New York Times article. That's precisely because it's actually not always the case that whatever the NYT happened to write at the time is either accurate or a complete picture. It's better to cite a proper historical study that's done a critical analysis of the original sources instead.

But for very recent things where nobody has written anything better, newspapers are treated as an acceptable source. Ideally, they will be replaced with something else, at some later date: the Syrian War article is currently mostly sourced from newspapers, but in 30 years it really should be written with citations to major books and articles on the subject, not cobbled together from newspaper articles. There are a few exceptions; for example, longer-form magazine biopics, and newspaper obituaries, sometimes provide good longer-term sources for middle-level-fame figures who aren't well-known enough for anyone to have written books or journal articles about them.