[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

Tue May 5 14:57:39 UTC 2009

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> But rebuilding civilisation is probably not the most likely use such
> archives would be put to (it's just the most exciting, so the one I
> mentioned). The historical and cultural value 1000 years from now of
> knowing what people 1000 years ago knew and thought would be immense.

But if you don't postulate a catastrophic event that we can't plan
for, like civilization ending due to an overnight thermonuclear war,
then we don't need to plan in advance.  If Wikipedia ceases to exist
at some point, and if at that point it looks like it would be useful
to preserve its contents, we could preserve it more durably at that
point.  We don't need to preserve it now.  In fact, it would be
counterproductive: better to preserve it at the last possible moment,
when it will contain as much data as possible.