The context is a discussion of Wikipedia’s “macro value” that is, that given how many articles there are and the relative quality to resources like Britannica, you are at least as likely (logically) to have a good experience and find accurate information in the Wikipedia on average.

I don’t think the dire implications here will come true because I don’t buy the fundamental premise that the incentive to create quality on a micro-scale is the same as that which drives things like Wikipedia. It’s not a zero-sum game with competitors sharing the same set of finite resources… though they may overlap. The demand will still be there for quality microscale content. In fact, if the overworked long tail has any validity at all, there will be much more demand for (and systems to support delivery of) quality information on the smaller scale (in both senses of the term) and a phenomenally large class of prosumers and enthusiasts creating a range of quality microscale content that could never have been sustained under older models.

The question is, will those models– will the forms– of the information survive? We will always have organized news media and citizen journalism, scholarly peer review and special interest publications, but we won’t necessarily always have the Washington Post and The Daily Kos, Nature and Arts and Letters Daily. In this sense Carr is correct– Britannica as we know it may not survive. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

[ruminate, wikipedia, information]