Oldak Quill wrote:
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.
I've read that Encarta represented the first shoe to drop for EB; it could not easily adapt to that technology shift. Now, with the benefit of hindsight this does not seem as though it would have been such a big change.
The major paradigm shift lay in the enabling of two-way online communications. The passive consumer could now also become a content producer. This wasn't quite what ISP's had hoped for in an asymmetrical technology that assumed that the public would want to download far more than they would upload. Their model also presumed that they would profit from also providing the content.
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.
One should not presume that any specific technology will be the one that leads to the big steps forward.
On 16/07/06, Daniel P. B. Smith wikipedia2006@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.
This technology is nowhere near as important as it once was, but its residual applications are likely to last for some considerable time yet.
"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?
In a sense soap operas are much older. In the 19th century many novels were first published in serial form. This social phenomenon may change the medium that carries it, but is likely to remain in some form or other.
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.
It's importance as an encyclopedia is likely to fade long before its role in the development of open data.
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