It occured to me that in one hundred, or even one thousand or more years, historians are going to use Wikipedia to figure out what it is that we thought of ourselves. Apparently we like Pokemon.
My argument goes like this: as Will argued a few days ago, Wikipedia, by virtue of it’s nature, could be more fair and balanced than any news network. The John Edwards article he discussed was pulled back and forth by differing viewpoints until finally an equilibrium of compromise was agreed on. While the article may or may not paint a true-to-life picture of things, it paints a picture that, in general, people find truth in — that is to say, an article on wikipedia is a snapshot of our current concensus about the state of the world.
Because Wikipedia tracks every change made on every page, ever, future historians will be able to look at the evolutionary histories of various topics, as they are filtered by the public eye of whoever makes up the current public. Events of the past that were controversial at the time they occured will be reported as being less and less inflamatory as future generations update the collective account of history to be in line with their current view of things. While I don’t expect a wholesale change of content, even compounded shifts of adjectives in an article over time could greatly change the meaning of articles. But, this shift can be clearly and explicitly tracked: a degree of honesty-over-time is built into the process.
I just hope that the integrity of the servers remain, I can just imagine future schoolchildren debating whether or not lightsabres actually existed: “but if they didn’t exist, why is the article 10,000 words long?”