Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years, will it survive
Posted on 18. Jan, 2011 by admin in Marketing
Wikipedia is just the latest in a long line of encyclopedias. In fact, encyclopedias have been around in some form or another for 2,000 years. The oldest, Naturalis Historia, written by Pliny the Elder, is still in existence.
How do I know this? I looked it up on Wikipedia (Wikipedia), of course. Is it true? Possibly.
Ten years after its founding, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before Wikipedia. When I was growing up, our family had a dusty set of encyclopedias that were at least 10 years old, which is fine if you’re looking up dinosaurs, but not so good if you want to know, for instance, who the current president of the Congo is. But though the limitations of the old encyclopedias were obvious, they were authoritative in ways that Wikipedia is not.
Like most people, I’ll take the tradeoff. I have no desire to go back to the days of printed Funk & Wagnalls. If someone would have told me back in 2001 that, within a few years, there would be a comprehensive, free online encyclopedia, I wouldn’t have believed them. Why would someone do that? How?
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