[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[John Lee]

On 2/27/07, T P <t0m0p0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2/26/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
> >
> >
> > Please enlighten me - what does "No angry mastodons" have to do with
> > whether any field is significant enough to be covered in Wikipedia?
> > Either now or fifteen years from now?
>
>
> It means there's no hurry.
>
> As a sidenote, I would add that for any field due to become significant
> > fifteen years in the future, we should already be covering, right now,
> > the building blocks that field will ultimately study. For example,
> > there's a bit of a push these days for Hip hop studies to gain
> > recognition as an interdisciplinary academic field. Argue if you like
> > about its legitimacy - I'm sure Citizendium would reject it; I observe
> > that no Wikipedia article exists yet. But if you can imagine what
> > Wikipedia would have looked like in 1992, I can assure you that it would
> > have included detailed articles on Public Enemy and N.W.A, and the
> > articles we have might look better for it today.
>
>
> If you can predict which fields will become significant in fifteen years,
> as
> opposed to which will become forgotten and make Wikipedia look foolish,
> you
> can make a lot of money.
>
> Adam


So you are saying that if a field is completely forgotten or outmoded, even
if we have the secondary sources to back us up and our encyclopaedia is not
on paper, we should not be including articles on that field? I'd like some
concrete examples - but then again, these are all hypotheticals since
nobody's ever written an encyclopaedia and published it in realtime. Then
again, could you perhaps point to some topics fifteen years old which you
think would not be worthy of inclusion in an encyclopaedia today, but would
have been included in Wikipedia by experts at the peak of the topics' fame?

Johnleemk