[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is forever.

[Oldak Quill]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 7/15/06, Daniel R. Tobias <dan at 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 now be seen as not only out-of-date in the type of knowledge which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 The technology used to construct it will surely be out of date in 100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
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-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)