The New York Times writes:
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 Wikipedias notion of the past has enlarged to include things that havent even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news
