On 2/26/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with
whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia?
Either now or fifteen years from now?
It means there's no hurry.
As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant
fifteen years in the future, we should already be
covering, right now,
the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example,
there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain
recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like
about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe
that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what
Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would
have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the
articles we have might look better for it today.
If you can predict which fields will become significant in fifteen years,
as
opposed to which will become forgotten and make Wikipedia look foolish,
you
can make a lot of money.
Adam
So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even
if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not
on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like some
concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since
nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime. Then
again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which you
think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would
have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?
Johnleemk