On 12/4/06, George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
One could just as easily wonder if wikipedia.org might one day dissapear.
Wikipedia at least has the advantage that it's actively mirrored in several places, probably has hundreds of other copies floating around, and explicitly encourages further replication.
A friend of mine works for the Internet Archive. They believe they're stable and mostly technically/talent limited on growth.
Yeah, I don't think it's really likely to disappear soon, but it would be nice not to have to rely on third party organisations with which we have no affiliation. And as I said, it's only a partial solution anyway - that only works for websites, and ones that were archived at the right time, at that.
If there's significant concern on these points, then the Wikimedia Foundation could form an exchange agreement with the IA, trading copies of the respective databases, for redundancy.
Hmm, you're suggesting taking a copy of a database consisting of several terabytes of data is preferable to copying a few webpages? Think of all that hardware...
Or send some of the $1 billion everyone keeps talking about thataway ;-)
$0.1 billion, but anyway...
Steve