The thing is that the Essjay incident is only one of probably thou--
er, hundreds of thousands of "who'll care about this in a decade"
articles, and as to probability of not caring, it's more likely to be
cared about than most. This is a point where we cannot answer the
question of what it means to say we are "encyclopedic", because the
only models we have are either (a) the paper enclopedias, whose space
limitations answer the question for them, or (b) sports statistics
compendiums and other exhaustive catalogs of subject data. Wikipedia
has in practice chosen to follow the latter, so the "of interest"
threshold is extremely low, and teh Essjay incident clears it with
ease.