[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia a News Portal (among other things)?

[David Gerard]

On 20/09/06, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9/20/06, Delirium <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> > I guess as a reader I don't see the benefit in *not* covering
> > everything.  I agree there is a slant towards more coverage of recent
> > news events, but that's simply because they're easier to cover.  The
> > solution, IMO, is not to cover recent events less, but to cover older
> > events more.  I want to know the equivalent of this stuff for other time
> > periods!  Were there short-lived but at the time massively-covered
> > events in the 1890s, equivalent to today's frenzies over child
> > kidnappings?  What about the thousands of political scandals, major and
> > minor, that have at various times shortened governments' tenures, forced
> > cabinet reshuffles, etc., etc.?  It's all good info we're missing!

> Problem is that a lot of the data that would be useful in answering
> your question is stored on microfilm and there isn't really a quick
> way to scan that.


It'll come, it'll come. Dumping everything onto disk scans in the
first instance. Just under two years doubling time. You won't be
*able* to buy a disk smaller than a petabyte in twenty years.

(Googling "hard disk" "moore's law" leads me to [[Moore's Law]], which
points me to [[Kryder's Law]], which is a useful study in hideous
self-reference and Wikipedia editorial decisions forming neologisms.
I'm so glad [[analogue disc record]] was moved before achieving any
currency anywhere else.)


- d.