more wikipedia

I guess this post is coming a bit late as our discussions of Wikipedia have come and gone (though our blog posts are getting increasingly random). But because I’m writing a paper for another class on encyclopedias (specifically Diderot’s Encyclopedia from the Enlightenment), I can’t help but compare the old encyclopedias of print to their Internet counterparts.
I read one article that states that the accumulation of knowledge will always be nothing but a “tragic ideal, embedded in historical time.” Basically knowledge (even if it’s true or even profound) continues to change as new thought comes to light. And the old knowledge, even if essentially unchanged, becomes part of something larger and would seem dated (or perhaps even incorrect) without being in the context of this new knowledge.
So I suppose that Wikipedia solves this dilemma by letting people constantly tweak things, it’s truly organic, thus not in danger of becoming obsolete (though definitely in danger of other problems). But I wonder if that’s necessarily a good thing. Would we have any use for more permanent records of what people thought at this exact moment in time? And even the “more permanent records” like the Britannica…isn’t that online and updated a lot?