On 31/03/2009, doc doc.wikipedia@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 ;-)