On 15 Jul 2006 at 00:34, "Gregory Maxwell" gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Along these lines: Will anyone care in a year? two years? ten years? one hundred years?
Wikipedia is forever.
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
Barring a total catastropic collapse of civilization (and possibly even then), it's likely that some copy of some portion of some version of Wikipedia will survive somewhere, given its wide dissemination. Such a thing will likely be an imporant resource for future historians / archeologists / anthropologists / etc. researching human culture of the early 21st century.
However, in such a scenario, the surviving Wikipedia would be merely a "dead" historical document, albeit a massive one with many alternative versions.
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
Hehe, look at [[WP:LAST]]
:)
Adam
On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 15 Jul 2006 at 00:34, "Gregory Maxwell" gmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
Along these lines: Will anyone care in a year? two years? ten years? one hundred years?
Wikipedia is forever.
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
Barring a total catastropic collapse of civilization (and possibly even then), it's likely that some copy of some portion of some version of Wikipedia will survive somewhere, given its wide dissemination. Such a thing will likely be an imporant resource for future historians / archeologists / anthropologists / etc. researching human culture of the early 21st century.
However, in such a scenario, the surviving Wikipedia would be merely a "dead" historical document, albeit a massive one with many alternative versions.
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
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Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
I'd say it's likely that some such thing will exist, whether called "Wikipedia" or not; possibly even multiple such things. I find it hard to imagine a scenario in which the idea of collaboratively building an encyclopedia through a global communications medium falls entirely out of favor and isn't revived by anyone.
-Mark
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
However, in such a scenario, the surviving Wikipedia would be merely a "dead" historical document, albeit a massive one with many alternative versions.
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
I think it should be "living", but thanks to the complete record of previous edits it would also still serve as a historical document - with a copy of the database it should be possible to "dial back" Wikipedia to a previous state at will. The only problem with using it as such might come when AfD or its successors starts deleting articles because they're "no longer notable any more", in which case articles of historical significance will start going down the memory hole and future researchers will need to resort to archived database copies for it.
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:14:07 -0400, "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@tobias.name wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
Microsoft will buy it. You know they will - nobody is allowed to have ay significant presence in the digital world without the Evil Empire taking an interest.
They will migrate it to .Net, the number of servers will multiply a hundredfold, performance will suck, and all contributions will be licensed under the MSFDL, which is sort of like GFDL except with Microsoft owning everything.
Guy (JzG)
Noting I am probably being trolled, but still... ;-) On Jul 15, 2006, at 12:00 PM, Guy Chapman aka JzG wrote:
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:14:07 -0400, "Daniel R. Tobias" dan@tobias.name wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
Microsoft will buy it. You know they will - nobody is allowed to have ay significant presence in the digital world without the Evil Empire taking an interest.
They *can't* buy it - depending on what you mean by "it". If you mean having a copy of the content they can do anything (that the GFDL lets them do) to, they already can have that, and they don't even have to pay for it. In fact, I'm slightly surprised they haven't set up a mirror on MSN already. If you mean the copyrights in the content, I know a large number of contributors won't sell theirs, so that's more or less moot, baring any joint authorship strangeness. If you mean owning the servers - hell, if Microsoft wanted to give us use of some servers they owned, I wouldn't refuse - but that doesn't give them much besides a nice publicity boost. If you mean owning the trademarks (name, logos, etc.), they'd have to go through the Foundation first. If you mean controlling the Wikimedia Foundation, that might happen, in which case there'd be a nasty, unpleasant split, with many contributors pooling their cash and buying new hardware, and things would go on more or less as they do now, except the leadership would change (and we'd have a nasty, big wiki-iezed competitor to deal with). Sort of like what happened with Napster. I can't think of any other meanings of "it" - if anyone has some, please post.
They will migrate it to .Net, the number of servers will multiply a hundredfold, performance will suck, and all contributions will be licensed under the MSFDL, which is sort of like GFDL except with Microsoft owning everything.
Well, they can't switch to the MSFDL if they want to combine it with existing Wikipedia content, unless they can suborn the FSF - in which case the world has ended, so we have other things to worry about... ;-)
Jesse Weinstein
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 12:20:05 -0700, Jesse W jessw@netwood.net wrote:
Microsoft will buy it. You know they will - nobody is allowed to have ay significant presence in the digital world without the Evil Empire taking an interest.
They *can't* buy it - depending on what you mean by "it".
The Foundation, of course. And the world. And a private furnace, bigger, hotter, far than yours!
Guy (JzG)
Daniel R. Tobias wrote:
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
I think it's quite likely. There is some scientific software that dates back into the 1960s, even the 1950s in a couple cases, and it's still being worked on despite being started on close to the very dawn of the computer age.
As time stretches out, context-setting becomes more and more important. The thousand-year-old [[Suda]] is online - eye-opening to read its entries that are equivalent to our stubs, and be unable to get much from them because things are mentioned but not explained, and the cited works have long since vanished.
Ironically, an implication is that a Brian Peppers article then becomes needed just to supply the background to all the arguing on this list and elsewhere... :-)
Stan
On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
1,000 years is too far in the future to judge anything. If there difference between 1000 AD and 2000 AD is any sort of barometer, 2006 will look pretty distant to 3006, not only technologically, but politically, nationally, globally, etc.
100 years is the difference between 1900 and 2000. Again, pretty hard to judge. But here we do have some institutions and regularly-produced documents that can be a sort of barometer. Encyclopedia Brittanica is the most useful analog to what we are talking about, and it is three hundred years old. But even just looking back to the 1911 edition, while some of the content is useful to use in 2006, much of it would now be seen as not only out-of-date in the type of knowledge which would be most expected to "age" (i.e. scientific knowledge) but even things which would not even be assumed to "age" quite as much are often pretty questionable (historigraphical method, for example, has changed considerably, and it is hard to even tell the same story about the same facts as one would a hundred years ago). But OK, even then, that's a pretty good aspiration -- the 1911 serves as a base for a new project, with new methods, and it does so primarily because it currently exists in a very open copyright context (i.e. it is public domain). Wikipedia's copyright context has been more-or-less open from the beginning (the "more-or-less" reflects my own uneasiness with the actual implementation of the GFDL, not its goals), though the free-content movement is so young that it is hard to know what the long-term effects will be (it may be that it effectively renders the content unusable, because it may be less commercially viable to use viral marketing, as one potential economic reason that it might not take off in the way the advocates would expect).
The technology used to construct it will surely be out of date in 100 years, if not 5 or 10. The World Wide Web dates only from the early 1990s, let us not forget, and Wiki technology is even younger than that. If the technology and information-production model is *not* out-of-date within the decade, it will be somewhat depressing.
Another view might be that the essence of Wiki technology -- communal editing -- could very well spread to many different aspects of internet usage. Wikipedia's "edit this page" could become a lot less special, and Wikipedia could lose out among all of the potential uses of people's time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally I think the long-term prospects of Wikipedia are probably better than most websites, but that doesn't say very much. Even without postulating technological-singularities and other over-hyped futurism, the web seems to me to have a pretty limited lifetime, and though I suppose the free content movement and most of the ideals of its adherents, I don't really believe in the permanency of information, on or off the web.
Most academics know that their work is going to be seen as "of a previous generation" in less than a decade. It's not really as dire as it sounds -- if it wasn't the case that most information aged rather poorly, there would be precious little work left to do in all fields of knowledge. If you aren't generating the future, then you're a doorstop. That being said, the fact that information can "age in realtime" on Wikipedia might make it a good deal more dynamic than things which came before it, and it could really stand out as something which could buck historical trends.
Personally, I'm a little pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that I am going to support the project any less, or believe its work to be futile. If Wikipedia stays "healthy" it could have a long life ahead of it, and with any luck its free content model could be useful to other projects in the future.
FF
On Sat, 15 Jul 2006 16:25:42 -0400, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
1,000 years is too far in the future to judge anything.
"This article has been deleted by the uploaded persona of [[User:Jimbo Wales]] and should not be re-created until 21 February 3007 at the earliest"
On WP:DRV: Review of Myg0t, recently re-created after the eight hundred and fourth deletion.
The GNAA AfD counter stands at 122,301. A "nominate GNAA for deletion" bot has now been approved to run nightly and thus reduce the rate to one AfD per day.
Guy (JzG)
This isn't how technology appears to develop (see the exponential view of history). The difference between 1000 and 2000 will equal the difference between 2000 and 2020 (for example). On 15/07/06, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
This is an interesting line of discussion... Just what does everybody think is likely to be the future of Wikipedia in ten, one hundred, one thousand, ... years?
1,000 years is too far in the future to judge anything. If there difference between 1000 AD and 2000 AD is any sort of barometer, 2006 will look pretty distant to 3006, not only technologically, but politically, nationally, globally, etc.
100 years is the difference between 1900 and 2000. Again, pretty hard to judge. But here we do have some institutions and regularly-produced documents that can be a sort of barometer. Encyclopedia Brittanica is the most useful analog to what we are talking about, and it is three hundred years old. But even just looking back to the 1911 edition, while some of the content is useful to use in 2006, much of it would now be seen as not only out-of-date in the type of knowledge which would be most expected to "age" (i.e. scientific knowledge) but even things which would not even be assumed to "age" quite as much are often pretty questionable (historigraphical method, for example, has changed considerably, and it is hard to even tell the same story about the same facts as one would a hundred years ago). But OK, even then, that's a pretty good aspiration -- the 1911 serves as a base for a new project, with new methods, and it does so primarily because it currently exists in a very open copyright context (i.e. it is public domain). Wikipedia's copyright context has been more-or-less open from the beginning (the "more-or-less" reflects my own uneasiness with the actual implementation of the GFDL, not its goals), though the free-content movement is so young that it is hard to know what the long-term effects will be (it may be that it effectively renders the content unusable, because it may be less commercially viable to use viral marketing, as one potential economic reason that it might not take off in the way the advocates would expect).
The technology used to construct it will surely be out of date in 100 years, if not 5 or 10. The World Wide Web dates only from the early 1990s, let us not forget, and Wiki technology is even younger than that. If the technology and information-production model is *not* out-of-date within the decade, it will be somewhat depressing.
Another view might be that the essence of Wiki technology -- communal editing -- could very well spread to many different aspects of internet usage. Wikipedia's "edit this page" could become a lot less special, and Wikipedia could lose out among all of the potential uses of people's time. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
Personally I think the long-term prospects of Wikipedia are probably better than most websites, but that doesn't say very much. Even without postulating technological-singularities and other over-hyped futurism, the web seems to me to have a pretty limited lifetime, and though I suppose the free content movement and most of the ideals of its adherents, I don't really believe in the permanency of information, on or off the web.
Most academics know that their work is going to be seen as "of a previous generation" in less than a decade. It's not really as dire as it sounds -- if it wasn't the case that most information aged rather poorly, there would be precious little work left to do in all fields of knowledge. If you aren't generating the future, then you're a doorstop. That being said, the fact that information can "age in realtime" on Wikipedia might make it a good deal more dynamic than things which came before it, and it could really stand out as something which could buck historical trends.
Personally, I'm a little pessimistic, but that doesn't mean that I am going to support the project any less, or believe its work to be futile. If Wikipedia stays "healthy" it could have a long life ahead of it, and with any luck its free content model could be useful to other projects in the future.
FF _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
Barring a total catastropic collapse of civilization (and possibly even then), it's likely that some copy of some portion of some version of Wikipedia will survive somewhere, given its wide dissemination. Such a thing will likely be an imporant resource for future historians / archeologists / anthropologists / etc. researching human culture of the early 21st century.
However, in such a scenario, the surviving Wikipedia would be merely a "dead" historical document, albeit a massive one with many alternative versions.
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
Since you asked. I think Wikipedia will continue to exist in pretty much its current form for 5 years. It will continue to be useful and referred to for ~10 years. 20 years from now, it will have been totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest future historians, archeologists or anthropologists, any more than archives of usenet from the early 1990s interest today's historians, archeologists or anthropologists.
I'm ok with that.
Steve
On 7/15/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
...20 years from now, it will have been totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest future historians, archeologists or anthropologists, any more than archives of usenet from the early 1990s interest today's historians, archeologists or anthropologists.
Yeah, but the retro-nerds will have RFA re-enactment parties, and they'll ironically put old-style "userboxes" all over their cyberpersonas. :-)
Freply
On Jul 15, 2006, at 2:08 PM, Steve Bennett wrote:
20 years from now, it will have been totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest future historians, archeologists or anthropologists, any more than archives of usenet from the early 1990s interest today's historians, archeologists or anthropologists.
20 years is about 10 times too little aging for something to interest an archeologist; maybe 5 times too little aging for a historian, and as for the anthropologists - there are already a few studying usenet (I think I remember reading anthro papers on usenet culture), and there are sure to be many more. I think you radically underestimate both the desperation of academics for interesting topics, and the sheer value (to academics) of a massive archive of primary source material. Presuming Wikipedia talk page data is available in 20 to 50 to 150 years, I expect considerable scholarly interest in it. As for the articles, probably less so, but they will probably interest historians as much as any other old encyclopedia, like [[Suda]], for example.
As for whether there will be a free-content, reader-editable encyclopedia around in some form in 50 years - I strongly suspect (and hope) so. Will it be called Wikipedia? No idea.
Jesse Weinstein
On 7/16/06, Jesse W jessw@netwood.net wrote:
are sure to be many more. I think you radically underestimate both the desperation of academics for interesting topics, and the sheer value (to academics) of a massive archive of primary source material. Presuming Wikipedia talk page data is available in 20 to 50 to 150 years, I expect considerable scholarly interest in it. As for the
The internet is still only just taking off (particularly in many developing countries), and community projects like this one are still fairly rare. That won't be the case for long.
As for whether there will be a free-content, reader-editable encyclopedia around in some form in 50 years - I strongly suspect (and hope) so. Will it be called Wikipedia? No idea.
Will it be based on Wikipedia's content?
Steve
In the future Wikipedia will be automatically scrape information from people's brains through "The Link" or something ([[The Outer Limits]] had a great episode about this)
On 7/16/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7/16/06, Jesse W jessw@netwood.net wrote:
are sure to be many more. I think you radically underestimate both the desperation of academics for interesting topics, and the sheer value (to academics) of a massive archive of primary source material. Presuming Wikipedia talk page data is available in 20 to 50 to 150 years, I expect considerable scholarly interest in it. As for the
The internet is still only just taking off (particularly in many developing countries), and community projects like this one are still fairly rare. That won't be the case for long.
As for whether there will be a free-content, reader-editable encyclopedia around in some form in 50 years - I strongly suspect (and hope) so. Will it be called Wikipedia? No idea.
Will it be based on Wikipedia's content?
Steve _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote: .........
Or, is it the belief here that a "living" Wikipedia, still being actively updated and open to such updates from the general public, will continue to exist for centuries to come?
-- == Dan ==
Hmm. Depends on how one defines the subject. I could argue that we have already seen at least one encyclopedia be open to updates from the general public for centuries to come- articles from EB and [[Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences]] have been incorporated in Wikipedia and updated by the "general public".
~maru
G'day Dan,
<many snips/>
Barring a total catastropic collapse of civilization (and possibly even then), it's likely that some copy of some portion of some version of Wikipedia will survive somewhere, given its wide dissemination. Such a thing will likely be an imporant resource for future historians / archeologists / anthropologists / etc. researching human culture of the early 21st century.
Leading 22nd/23rd/24th/whenever historians to be the first of their kind with the chance to rely on a reasonably accurate picture of the culture they're studying.
Imagine people one, two, three hundred years from now looking back at what we're doing now; studying what Wikipedia has to say about YTMND and so on and concluding that it's pretty much all that university-aged males like Yours Truly were doing in the early 21st Century.
Thank God I'll be dead by then, and not have to face the embarrassment of explaining what my fellow humans were doing in my lifetime.