[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Fastfission]

On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at tobias.name> wrote:
> This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody
> think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred,
> one thousand, ... years?

1,000 years is too far in the future to judge anything. If there
difference between 1000 AD and 2000 AD is any sort of barometer, 2006
will look pretty distant to 3006, not only technologically, but
politically, nationally, globally, etc.

100 years is the difference between 1900 and 2000. Again, pretty hard
to judge. But here we do have some institutions and regularly-produced
documents that can be a sort of barometer. Encyclopedia Brittanica is
the most useful analog to what we are talking about, and it is three
hundred years old. But even just looking back to the 1911 edition,
while some of the content is useful to use in 2006, much of it would
now be seen as not only out-of-date in the type of knowledge which
would be most expected to "age" (i.e. scientific knowledge) but even
things which would not even be assumed to "age" quite as much are
often pretty questionable (historigraphical method, for example, has
changed considerably, and it is hard to even tell the same story about
the same facts as one would a hundred years ago). But OK, even then,
that's a pretty good aspiration -- the 1911 serves as a base for a new
project, with new methods, and it does so primarily because it
currently exists in a very open copyright context (i.e. it is public
domain). Wikipedia's copyright context has been more-or-less open from
the beginning (the "more-or-less" reflects my own uneasiness with the
actual implementation of the GFDL, not its goals), though the
free-content movement is so young that it is hard to know what the
long-term effects will be (it may be that it effectively renders the
content unusable, because it may be less commercially viable to use
viral marketing, as one potential economic reason that it might not
take off in the way the advocates would expect).

The technology used to construct it will surely be out of date in 100
years, if not 5 or 10. The World Wide Web dates only from the early
1990s, let us not forget, and Wiki technology is even younger than
that. If the technology and information-production model is *not*
out-of-date within the decade, it will be somewhat depressing.

Another view might be that the essence of Wiki technology -- communal
editing -- could very well spread to many different aspects of
internet usage. Wikipedia's "edit this page" could become a lot less
special, and Wikipedia could lose out among all of the potential uses
of people's time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Personally I think the long-term prospects of Wikipedia are probably
better than most websites, but that doesn't say very much. Even
without postulating technological-singularities and other over-hyped
futurism, the web seems to me to have a pretty limited lifetime, and
though I suppose the free content movement and most of the ideals of
its adherents, I don't really believe in the permanency of
information, on or off the web.

Most academics know that their work is going to be seen as "of a
previous generation" in less than a decade. It's not really as dire as
it sounds -- if it wasn't the case that most information aged rather
poorly, there would be precious little work left to do in all fields
of knowledge. If you aren't generating the future, then you're a
doorstop. That being said, the fact that information can "age in
realtime" on Wikipedia might make it a good deal more dynamic than
things which came before it, and it could really stand out as
something which could buck historical trends.

Personally, I'm a little pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that I am
going to support the project any less, or believe its work to be
futile. If Wikipedia stays "healthy" it could have a long life ahead
of it, and with any luck its free content model could be useful to
other projects in the future.

FF