[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Oldak Quill]

I think it is more to do with Wikipedia's ability to adapt and change
with developing technology. If Encyclopedia Britannica had created a
wiki back in 2000, Wikipedia may not exist and Britannica would have
extended their lifetime by a few decades.

As long as we are willing to embrace changes and developments (such
as, at the moment, Wiktionary Z and Semantic MediaWiki) and don't
object for reasons of familiarity, we should do fine.

On 16/07/06, Daniel P. B. Smith <wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com> wrote:
> The Encyclopaedia Britannica As We Know It has existed from, say, the
> ninth edition (1889) to the present, and is probably in sharp decline
> now. Let's say it's had about a 150-year life. I don't think it has
> another twenty years in it. And I don't think the Boston Globe will
> be available as smudgy ink on pulp paper delivered to front porches
> in twenty years, either...
>
> The slide rule as we know it--as a working tool for engineers--lasted
> from about 1860 into the 1970s... a bit over a century.
>
> Carbon paper... didn't really come into its own until the invention
> of the typewriter... it's lasted a bit over a century, too.
>
> "New media" though, have had a shorter life.
>
> The text adventure game: Colossal Cave, early 1970s, to about 1990
> and the folding of Infocom. About twenty years?
>
> The soap opera: 1930 to present. The _radio_ soap opera, though,
> obviously had a much shorter life. Thirty years?
>
> Wikipedia is much harder to predict, though, because it is changing
> over time and will continue to do so. I'd give good odds that ten
> years from now there will be a recognizable "website" on something
> called the "Internet" named "Wikipedia" that will be an online
> encyclopedia, but I wouldn't bet that its culture and policies will
> be closely similar to those in existence today.
>
>
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-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)