Ian Woollard wrote:
On 30/03/2009, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
And then someone will come up with a better way of delivering information than a wiki...
Probably, but I think people, if they still live, will still be talking about the wikipedia in a thousand years, like they still talk about the Library of Alexandria.
Ha, hyperbolic optimism, I trust, otherwise perhaps the delusions of a very "true believer" [note to self - avoid koolaid cliché]
The Library of Alexandria was with us for between 350 and a thousand years (depending on which history book you read), Wikipedia has been with us for a total of 8.
Now, I don't want to underestimate the achievements of Wikipedia, however, Encarta (1993-2009)has had a longer run, and was part of an equally ground-breaking genre of knowledge provision at its start.
I do suspect that Wikipedia will be cited in future histories as a significant example of a collaborative community. It will be to online libraries as E-bay is currently to online auctions. Whether wikipedia will prove to be a significant milestone in the collection and dissemination of knowledge, remains to be seen. It rather depends on what the next generation brings, and whether it will owe a recognisable debt to Wikipedia, or whether it will take us in another direction altogether. (If, for example, global copright laws were to change, the future might look more like wikisource - a library - than wikipedia, an encyclopedia.)
Further, I'm no historian of technology. But the lesson surely is that not much lasts for long. Few organisations have been able to dominate any field for more than a decade or so. (Microsoft is perhaps the (dis?)honourable exception - and even then.) Today's unassailable phenomena, which no one can see anyone displacing, is tomorrow's footnote. BASIC anyone? Sinclair? Plastic records?
The other reason I suspect that Wikipedia's shelf-life will, in fact, be shorter than most imagine, is that in the fast-changing evolution that is the internet, the ability to adapt is critical to survival. The browser that doesn't update is history. Sadly, for a relatively young phenomenon, Wikipedia, and particularly en.wp has shown an enormous conservatism about adapting. An initial winning formula that gave the breakthrough is regarded as sacred dogma - and a demand for consensus before change gives the dinosaurs an advantage. At the moment it matters little, as there is no real competition. But if/when a competitor get the magic formula right, I doubt Wikipedia has the structures to compete. The community hasn't really woken up to the fact that Wikipedia is no longer only an open shelf needing to be stacked, but it is a depository of a huge wealth of material that needs to be protected, sorted and (urgently) sifted.
Alexandria's library didn't fail because it stopped importing knowledge, it failed because it was unable to effectively protect the knowledge it had already acquired.