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Wikipedia and the End of Archeology
Andy Updegrove writes "Far too much attention has been paid to whether or not the Wikipedia is accurate enough. The greater significance of the Wikipedia today, and even more for those in the future, is its reality as the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time. Moreover, with its multiple language versions, it also demonstrates how different cultures understand the same facts, historical events and trends at the same time. Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find. In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure-trove for data."
I suspect someone probably *CAN* figure out how to decipher the backup tape of Wikipedia a thousand years from now. We will call that person an archaeologist. Just as today archaeologists recover fragments of paper or papyrus or human femurs, archaeologists a thousand years from now (probably 200 years from now, actually) will recover fragments of disk drives and magnetic tapes and human femurs, and they'll try to figure out all of the same things about us that we're trying to figure out about our predecessors. Resources that have been preserved, like books and Wikipedia histories, will be useful too, just as books from historical times are useful now - but there will certainly be questions that they don't answer.