I think it is more to do with Wikipedia's ability to adapt and change with developing technology. If Encyclopedia Britannica had created a wiki back in 2000, Wikipedia may not exist and Britannica would have extended their lifetime by a few decades.
As long as we are willing to embrace changes and developments (such as, at the moment, Wiktionary Z and Semantic MediaWiki) and don't object for reasons of familiarity, we should do fine.
On 16/07/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@dpbsmith.com wrote:
The Encyclopaedia Britannica As We Know It has existed from, say, the ninth edition (1889) to the present, and is probably in sharp decline now. Let's say it's had about a 150-year life. I don't think it has another twenty years in it. And I don't think the Boston Globe will be available as smudgy ink on pulp paper delivered to front porches in twenty years, either...
The slide rule as we know it--as a working tool for engineers--lasted from about 1860 into the 1970s... a bit over a century.
Carbon paper... didn't really come into its own until the invention of the typewriter... it's lasted a bit over a century, too.
"New media" though, have had a shorter life.
The text adventure game: Colossal Cave, early 1970s, to about 1990 and the folding of Infocom. About twenty years?
The soap opera: 1930 to present. The _radio_ soap opera, though, obviously had a much shorter life. Thirty years?
Wikipedia is much harder to predict, though, because it is changing over time and will continue to do so. I'd give good odds that ten years from now there will be a recognizable "website" on something called the "Internet" named "Wikipedia" that will be an online encyclopedia, but I wouldn't bet that its culture and policies will be closely similar to those in existence today.
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