On 16/01/2011 23:46, Tony Sidaway wrote:
We don't need to be able to find every single thing on the internet, only the useful stuff. A huge amount of the useful stuff is on Wikipedia.
This is true, but not particularly "objective". The OP's question itself has merit. The long-term view surely must depend on whether [[Moore's law]] is with us or against us on this issue, for example. The "content" of the Web in particular is limited only by the number of hard drives that can be lashed onto it. The idea that a search engine company could download "all" webpages so as to have a local copy to work on may some day seem laughably naive (and I believe is already obsolescent).
Starting to play with ideas, and taking Carcharoth's main point to be about "cruft" (we have the concept, and do at least try to bear down on cruft on enWP), you get the distinctions cruft/non-cruft on utility, shallow/deep (Berners-Lee), structured data/non-structured. WP is very much shallow-Web, anti-cruft but not snobbishly so, and semi-structured (we have infoboxes even if some of us regard them as trojan horses for tendentiousness). That says a bit more objectively what "useful" might mean, at least.
Charles