It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia.
This new business of people writing up their knowledge for free (wikpedia, stackexchange, forums, reddit, etc) is relatively new, and only semi-working.
Even today, encyclopedia briticana is still selling an encyclopedia product for about $75 a year.
The new business model is competiting with the old one. Generally the new model is winning on price and breadth, by a fairly wide margin. Accuracy seems about the same for both business models.
A business model doesn't need to be perfect to win, it just needs to be slightly better.
> It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia.
I think writing books for money is a newish phenomenom. I think historically you probably had more of a patronage system for most art. Selling your written work is a lot harder in the pre-printing press era.
That being said Wikipedia is not a substitute of the "old" web.
