The thing is that the Essjay incident is only one of probably thou-- er, hundreds of thousands of "who'll care about this in a decade" articles, and as to probability of not caring, it's more likely to be cared about than most. This is a point where we cannot answer the question of what it means to say we are "encyclopedic", because the only models we have are either (a) the paper enclopedias, whose space limitations answer the question for them, or (b) sports statistics compendiums and other exhaustive catalogs of subject data. Wikipedia has in practice chosen to follow the latter, so the "of interest" threshold is extremely low, and teh Essjay incident clears it with ease.