I stumbled upon the entry Playstation Home in Wikipedia, currently described as "a community-based service for the PlayStation Network which has been in development since early 2005".

What fascinates me is neither that Playstation Home will feature a lot of advertising space, nor that an encyclopedic entry covers a very commercial product. Encyclopedias are supposed to cover everything, including branded stuff. It is also (increasingly) common knowledge that people have for a very long time used social media (discussion boards, blogs, wikis, etc.) to converse about products that are in the market. 

The new, and most interesting, idea for me (at least) is that an encyclopedia describes something that does not yet exist. Without getting too philosophical, I used to think of an encyclopedia as a source of knowledge about what exists. The known could thus be shared and distributed over time and space. I have also become used to acknowledge the power and usefulness of an encyclopedia (like Wikipedia) that is in pace with state-of-the art knowledge (about what is).

But here an encyclopedia starts to describe something that does not exist. Knowledge about something that is to become. And as a result the becoming may very well be re-defined by the knowledge about something that is not.

Do we have to re-think "encyclopedia"?

Mind boggling.

[Thanks to Ilya Vedrashko and Futurelab for pointing me to the nothing]