Churnalism now updated with fresher Wikipedia content

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Churnalism via the Sunlight Foundation

We’ve updated our version of Churnalism, making it more reliable than ever to discover the journalism you can trust — and what you should question.

As time goes on, our copy of Wikipedia grows older. Part of our goal is to detect instances where a writer has copied text directly from Wikipedia. The older our copy of Wikipedia is, the more likely we will be to generate false negative results for Wikipedia articles that are edited often. To mitigate this issue, we were busy during the holiday season updating our copy of Wikipedia from Nov. 30, 2013.

While most articles from Wikipedia have not matched any user articles, there have been some special results. With the updated corpus, when you view previous results, such as [this prematurely published obituary for George Soros](http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/sidebyside/02f840bdca1b517cb2079ab0ab4c2f18/10/698006/), you will see both the original match dated “2012-04-23” and the match dated “2013-11-30.” If the current version of the George Soros entry no longer matched the previously searched obituary, the second article would be omitted.

![Screenshot of Churnalism Match](http://assets.sunlightfoundation.com.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/churnmatchexample1.jpg)

All of this simply means that when you use Churnalism you will enjoy better matching sensitivity. That’s true whether you use [the web site](http://churnalism.sunlightfoundation.com/) or the browser extensions for [Chrome](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/churnalism/igpjommbbpdncpcnjkombboimdclgdhm?hl=en-US) and [Firefox](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/churnalism/).