[WikiEN-l] Long-term searchability of the internet

[Charles Matthews]

On 16/01/2011 23:46, Tony Sidaway wrote:

 > We
> don't need to be able to find every single thing on the internet, only
> the useful stuff.  A huge amount of the useful stuff is on Wikipedia.
This is true, but not particularly "objective". The OP's question itself 
has merit. The long-term view surely must depend on whether [[Moore's 
law]] is with us or against us on this issue, for example. The "content" 
of the Web in particular is limited only by the number of hard drives 
that can be lashed onto it. The idea that a search engine company could 
download "all" webpages so as to have a local copy to work on may some 
day seem laughably naive (and I believe is already obsolescent).

Starting to play with ideas, and taking Carcharoth's main point to be 
about "cruft" (we have the concept, and do at least try to bear down on 
cruft on enWP), you get the distinctions cruft/non-cruft on utility, 
shallow/deep (Berners-Lee), structured data/non-structured. WP is very 
much shallow-Web, anti-cruft but not snobbishly so, and semi-structured 
(we have infoboxes even if some of us regard them as trojan horses for 
tendentiousness). That says a bit more objectively what "useful" might 
mean, at least.

Charles