On 2/27/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
T P wrote:
There's nothing stupid about a prestigious
reference work (as Wikipedia has
become) waiting for a field to become significant before writing about it.
If it becomes significant in fifteen years, we can write about it in fifteen
years.
The world is moving faster than that. One unique feature about
Wikipedia is that it is contemporaneous with its content. Some of the
details which make our time what it is are ephemeral, and may not be
researchable in fifteen years.
Wait a minute...are you saying that all the secondary sources on a
particular topic available now will no longer be available in fifteen years?
It's difficult to imagine that being true, unless it's for some particularly
rare topic. I can't imagine many ephemeral fields where many articles are
allegedly unfairly being deleted.
It's possible webcomics are one of those fields - and I'm not saying they
aren't - but normally one argument in favour of waiting is that we rarely
have the necessary perspective now, but that given a certain amount of time,
we will be able to look back and better assess what is important, and what
is not. The idea is that some subjects will no longer be researchable, but
that this is a good thing, because of some form of darwinisim, i.e. the
non-notable chaff will be separated from the wheat.
I'm not saying I endorse this line of thought, but it's an interesting one
that shouldn't be rejected out of hand.
I wouldn't say that they will _all_ disappear. There is bound to be a
certain randomness about what disappears.. Using webcomics for the sake
of argument, some will almost certainly disappear, but we cannot know
now which will be notable fifteen years hense. Many will reflect a
zeitgeist, but you are a least right when you say that we do not now
have the necessary perspective We can still represent the basics of a
specific webcomic. So too can someone else do that for another
webcomic This sets up the building blocks for the more evaluative
article that will be written in 15 years. This will be especially
important in pop culture articles.
Ec