[WikiEN-l] Microsoft kills Encarta

[Ian Woollard]

On 31/03/2009, doc <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> The Library of Alexandria was with us for between 350 and a thousand
> years (depending on which history book you read), Wikipedia has been
> with us for a total of 8.

Yes, and it's been ranked about 8 on the entire freaking internet for
a lot of that time! Things that happen relatively early on in the
course of something (like the internet) tend to get 'frozen in' and
have much longer life than you would expect they could have, google
for example is not going away any time soon.

When you look at the useful man-hours that have gone into the
Wikipedia, and are still going in, it's on an upward trajectory that
shows every sign of continuing for about another decade or more.

Once you have a mass of information that big, it's not going away any time soon.

It would take something really spectacular to eclipse it; machine
summarisation might do it, but I suspect even the machines will be
thumbing the wikipedia over to find out what's important and for a
place to start their research ;-)
-- 
-Ian Woollard

We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly
imperfect world would be *much* better. Life in an imperfectly perfect
world would be pretty ghastly though.