The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.

Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year, according to research firm Hitwise. At current growth rates, it is set to overtake The New York Times on the Web, the Drudge Report and other news sites. —Wikipedia Overtaking Major News Sites (CNN)

We’re still covering the basic differences between print, online, and TV journalism in my news writing class, so I’m not ready to introduce this topic just yet. But I’ll blog it so I can find it.