On Jul 15, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
20 years from now, it will have been
totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest
future historians, archeologists or anthropologists, any more than
archives of usenet from the early 1990s interest today's historians,
archeologists or anthropologists.
20 years is about 10 times too little aging for something to interest
an archeologist; maybe 5 times too little aging for a historian, and as
for the anthropologists - there are already a few studying usenet (I
think I remember reading anthro papers on usenet culture), and there
are sure to be many more. I think you radically underestimate both the
desperation of academics for interesting topics, and the sheer value
(to academics) of a massive archive of primary source material.
Presuming Wikipedia talk page data is available in 20 to 50 to 150
years, I expect considerable scholarly interest in it. As for the
articles, probably less so, but they will probably interest historians
as much as any other old encyclopedia, like [[Suda]], for example.
As for whether there will be a free-content, reader-editable
encyclopedia around in some form in 50 years - I strongly suspect (and
hope) so. Will it be called Wikipedia? No idea.
Jesse Weinstein