John Lee wrote:
On 2/27/07, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
T P wrote:
There's nothing stupid about a prestigious reference work (as Wikipedia has
become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about it.
If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in fifteen
years.
The world is moving faster than that. One unique feature about Wikipedia is that it is contemporaneous with its content. Some of the details which make our time what it is are ephemeral, and may not be researchable in fifteen years.
Wait a minute...are you saying that all the secondary sources on a particular topic available now will no longer be available in fifteen years? It's difficult to imagine that being true, unless it's for some particularly rare topic. I can't imagine many ephemeral fields where many articles are allegedly unfairly being deleted.
It's possible webcomics are one of those fields - and I'm not saying they aren't - but normally one argument in favour of waiting is that we rarely have the necessary perspective now, but that given a certain amount of time, we will be able to look back and better assess what is important, and what is not. The idea is that some subjects will no longer be researchable, but that this is a good thing, because of some form of darwinisim, i.e. the non-notable chaff will be separated from the wheat.
I'm not saying I endorse this line of thought, but it's an interesting one that shouldn't be rejected out of hand.
I wouldn't say that they will _all_ disappear. There is bound to be a certain randomness about what disappears.. Using webcomics for the sake of argument, some will almost certainly disappear, but we cannot know now which will be notable fifteen years hense. Many will reflect a zeitgeist, but you are a least right when you say that we do not now have the necessary perspective We can still represent the basics of a specific webcomic. So too can someone else do that for another webcomic This sets up the building blocks for the more evaluative article that will be written in 15 years. This will be especially important in pop culture articles.
Ec