On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 12:52 AM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
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For the rather longer term citing interplanetary sources is going to be one of the problems an interplanetary wikipedia would face.
You just get the feeling, don't you, that the future sometimes takes care of itself. Can the way information is handled change so much that "citing" it becomes irrelevant? Will all information packets contain within themselves some "provenance", allowing people to verify the information first-hand? And will the programs used by that far-future information-gathering and information-querying system spider along the information trail to verify things for those gathering the information?
Or will information networks in the future be a contradictory mess?
Imagine citing information in a world where time travel was possible! Or there were alternate universes! How about citing information passed between alien species with a totally different concept of information recording and flow?
Are we fully off-topic for this list yet? :-)
Carcharoth