BBC News is one of the most popular sites on the web. It’s steeped in the high journalistic principles that have driven the corporation for the last 80-odd years or so.

The BBC can struggle to innovate on its website however. Since it has such a large audience and generally well-organised structure, it has become a sort of de facto standard for presentation of content-rich sites. Changing this standard makes visitors nervous. Perhaps more significantly, the corporation’s funding is significantly targeted on producing TV and radio rather than web, despite many of the corporation’s multi-platform aspirations. Innovation in the browser faces stringent public critique.

Nevertheless, there are experiments in improving web delivery. Recently, particularly for viewers in the UK, the site has seen an increase in the use of embedded video delivered via its iPlayer. There’s an obvious attempt to make the website more multimedia, but it does beg the question, will people watch video in a browser at work? People scan the news, particularly on the web. They’re a great deal less likely to sit and watch a video.

Then you have the issue of external links. The web is, after all, about a worldwide information network, so your own information becomes richer as you link to content beyond your site. The problem is that you don’t own that content, which means that it can say things that you disagree with or that might make you look less than impartial (important in the case of the BBC).

Consequently, the BBC has a disclaimer for any external links. But it does beg the question, why have they introduced inline links to Wikipedia?

Clearly Wikipedia is very Web 2.0 for the BBC marketing team, at the heart of the social web. But that brings real problems for a sites whose content is supposed to be reliable. Wikipedia is inherently unreliable, even though it is peer-reviewed in extremis. The BBC has no way of checking that the biographies supplied on the site are accurate, but it treats this as additional reference information and by doing so undermines the its own journalism.

I’m a fan of the BBC News website and I recognise that the corporation struggles to fulfil both its official remit and target new markets, but the quality of your content can be measured not just by what it says and how it is written, but by where it positions itself in the web. If you reference external sites whose authority is questionable, you undermine the value of your own content.

Visitors to BBC news are looking for accurate content. By hopping on the Wikipedia bandwagon, the BBC is undermining its users’ objectives.