[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Delirium]

T P wrote:
> On 2/26/07, Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:
>   
>> 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.
>   

I don't see why we would look foolish for having good historical 
coverage.  If a field was *ever* of enough note to have multiple 
reliable sources we can cite, then we ought to cover it, and that will 
still be true 15 and 150 years from now.  The solution to imbalanced 
coverage between present-day and older stuff is not to reduce our 
generally thorough coverage of present-day stuff, but to greatly improve 
our much sparser coverage of anything older than 50 years.  Was there 
some field of study that was briefly popular in 1830 but faded to 
insignificance by 1845?  If anyone's written anything reliable about it 
that we can cite, then I'd like to be able to read an article on the 
subject.

-Mark