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20 years from now, it will have been totally superseded and no one will give a shit - it will not interest future historians, archeologists or anthropologists, any more than archives of usenet from the early 1990s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