Geez, I'd be more charitable. Back in 1982, storage and bandwidth were so limited that even online encyclopedias were pie-in-the-sky so even thinking it was possible put you in pretty visionary company.
As for user-editable I can find two predictions which might qualify.
First, Vannevar Bush's Memex:
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ... The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."
-- As We May Think (1945)
Douglas Adams managed to predict the user-editable encyclopedia in 1982's "Life, The Universe and Everything": "most of the actual work [on the Hitch-hiker's Guide] got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing."
But he didn't predict an online one, in the series at the time, HG2G was a local e-book or database-type encyclopedia that was updated via the Sub-Etha network.
Vannevar Bush had some amazing insights in 1945 about the future direction of storage:
"The Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk".
h2g2 was also a user-driven online network/local encyclopedia that predated the wikipedia launch by 2 years (according to Wikipedia ;)). So, Douglas Adams even built it before Wikipedia:
Isn't it crazy that Wikipedia launched not before 2001? (And wasn't relevant till 2003.) It is so ingrained in my Web habits that I have the feeling it existed already in the 90s.
You hit the nail on the head! I thought of some other things that would have floored me 10-15 years ago.
* Ask yourself what you used to search before Google? In fact, remember Web Rings?
* How did you share pictures before Facebook, Myspace, or Flickr?
* How about the holy grail of watching videos online before Youtube (Otherwise known as the dark ages of Real Player)?
* Remember when you had to print out Mapquest directions to somebody's house? God forbid you missed a turn! When was the last time you consulted a paper map other than for fun?
* How did you deal with the mountains of spam before Gmail, or any other industrial strength spam filter?
* How about getting the internet on your cell phone?
* When was the last time you had to pay for WiFi? Granted there are some holdouts, like airports, but WiFi is practically everywhere. If you can get into a Starbucks you have access, for free, to the internet.
* How about downloading a 10mb file in less than an hour? God help you if the connection was interrupted...
The things we do today are astounding in both the scope of their capabilities and how much we take them for granted.
I actually remember the first time I used Wikipedia, in '02 or '03, while researching pyrethrum insecticide in high school. It was such a qualitative improvement over other centralized resources; I wondered how I ever got by without it. Same way I felt when I found Google a few years earlier, and when I got an iPhone a few years later.
I've actually used Wikipedia that way - as a locally stored database dump. Evopedia on the N900 made this easy, even though it also took a major part of my SD card to do so.
Very useful when traveling in a world where 3G roaming is still prohibitively expensive, much like it would probably be for intergalactic hitchikers.
As for user-editable I can find two predictions which might qualify.
First, Vannevar Bush's Memex:
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest. The physician, puzzled by a patient's reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. ... The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected."
-- As We May Think (1945)
Douglas Adams managed to predict the user-editable encyclopedia in 1982's "Life, The Universe and Everything": "most of the actual work [on the Hitch-hiker's Guide] got done by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices of an afternoon and saw something worth doing."
But he didn't predict an online one, in the series at the time, HG2G was a local e-book or database-type encyclopedia that was updated via the Sub-Etha network.
Vannevar Bush had some amazing insights in 1945 about the future direction of storage:
"The Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk".