On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 9:31 AM, doc doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
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Further, I'm no historian of technology.
Read up on it - it is fascinating.
But the lesson surely is that not much lasts for long.
Some technologies endure, but just change. Telecommunications, for example. People will always want to communicate, and the telephone (for example) has changed a lot, but people will hopefully always want to talk to each other. Ditto pictures. The big revolutions in the future will likely be around the senses and how we feed input into them. Not quite brains in a box, but moving in that direction.
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?
Spotify?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify
I've read that streaming online games and music will replace gaming consoles and iPods. Might well be true. But then the book has been resilient.
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.
Possibly there is no magic formula, only a lot of hard work.
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.
Agreed. Though is it annoying when you see people working on things to address this, and then see critics, who inspired some people, carry on criticising the meta-processes, instead of supporting efforts made to improve those meta-processes. Cynicism on your part, maybe, but please don't infect people trying to change things.
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.
I thought it got ransacked?
Goodness, they aren't even sure when or how it was destroyed!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Destruction_of_the_Librar...
Carcharoth