Wikipedia redefines "encyclopedia" 2 Jul 2007

From The New York Times:

"Love it or hate it, though, its success is past denying -- 6.8 million registered users worldwide, at last count, and 1.8 million separate articles in the English-language Wikipedia alone -- and that success has borne an interesting side effect. Just as the Internet has accelerated most incarnations of what we mean by the word 'information,' so it has sped up what we mean when we employ the very term 'encyclopedia.' For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia's notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven't even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news -- to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information."