Dec 06 2005 10:36:31 AM EST
Will Wikipedia Fail in Five Years?
My friend Eric Goldman, who’s a law professor at Marquette, has bet me that Wikipedia will fail within five years. Here’s his blog posting about the bet.
I read Jimbo Wales’s announcement — that soon anonymous authors won’t be able to start Wikipedia articles — as being less significant than Eric thinks it is. First of all, anonymous authors will still be able to edit Wikipedia entries, and so still will be able, theoretically, to accomplish all the evils Eric worries about. Secondly, I think part of the design of Wikipedia was to allow for the evolution of contributor standards, even though as a “foundational” principle anonymous contributors will always be allowed to edit it. Such evolution ought to be enough to keep Wikipedia alive and vital in the face of a changing digital environment.
Dec 13 2005 12:21:03 PM EST
Comment by: tcd
I think so also. Mabye not so popular in five years - but it will be there.
Dec 18 2005 01:55:16 PM EST
Comment by: yndy
Your laugh for the day:
I was attempting to explain someone else’s reference to Godwin’s Law on livejournal - the quick Google search brought up the Wikipedia entry first.
I linked here through that entry to find this one.
I’d have to agree that wikipedia in its present form won’t exist 5 years from now. I suspect it will still ‘be there’ - but perhaps by then it will have managed to become more a source of amusement than one of reference.
It takes a very long while, it seems, for the ‘general internet population’ to absorb information such as “this is not a reliable source for facts.”
Dec 20 2005 01:25:14 PM EST
Comment by: DHB
Considering what is still floating around “out there” in cyberspace, years after it was created, I have to ask whether it really will matter, in five years, that something does or doesn’t exist online?
What will matter is will you be able to find it, will you be able to verify it, and associated with that, it actually possible to “unpublish.” Finding it seems simple… “just google.” Only, there is so much content out there and more being made every day. How long before we need the google googler or a wiki just to describe all the existing wikis? How long before you have a haystack like stack of needles?
The next part of that - how will you be able to verify something? This, I think, gets harder every day in large part due to the “bit rot” like effects of the continued bluring between reality - real information - and what is just product marketing. CNN’s website is, I think a prime example. The “news” there seems to be more and more about what various divisions of the Time Warner media empire have produced than about what is actually going on in the world.
Finally, how do you unpublish something? How do you know someone out there doesn’t have a copy? What copy is the “real” one? This, I think, Further brings to question the “what is the truth” from above. Is Starwars better art now?
Dec 20 2005 01:49:18 PM EST
Comment by: DHB
Of course - None of these topics seem new, really:
http://www.hotwired.com/special/pornscare/index.html