[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Jesse W]

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 totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest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