> 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".

On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote: 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back to the 1911 edition, while some of the content is useful to use in 2006, much of it would now be seen as not only out-of-date in the type of knowledge which would be most expected to "age" (i.e. scientific knowledge) but even things which would not even be assumed to "age" quite as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 The technology used to construct it will surely be out of date in 100 years, if not 5 or 10.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 If the technology and information-production model is *not* out-of-date within the decade, it will be somewhat depressing.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(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

...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.

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

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.