Note that this has already played out in the technical press. They pay people wages (still, slightly). But (a) there is effectively no wall between advertising and editorial (b) the writing that makes money is that which trolls for page clicks most effectively. There are still a few actual journalists there, but this is basically the model. The scary thing for the general newspapers is that they are blatantly adopting this policy, e.g. the Telegraph in the UK, where you get points (towards not being made redundant) by getting as many clicks as possible. The Daily Mail are actually very good at this. Thus, commercial journalism without a captive income stream seems to descend toward bottom-feeding.

In the case of Wikipedia, we noticed around 2005 that a search on a piece of Wikipedia text would get three pages of mirror sites before us. I believe some people contacted Google asking "hey, what's up with that?" and then a short while later it was fixed. (It was about then Wikipedia started showing up as the top of every Google result for everything ...) I think we assumed that this was a more general algorithm penalising duplicate content. But your example suggests it isn't.

Thank you so much for this. BLPs are one of our biggest issues. I do some press for Wikimedia in the UK, and I *frequently* have the person interviewing me ask how to fix their bad article. How's our BLP response team - badly short of people, slightly short of people, full and ready? What's a good way to recruit experienced volunteers to handle the load? I've proposed to the communications committee that, when we have enough volunteers on hand, we do a blog post about how to deal with a problem article about yourself and where to go.