I'm splitting off a separate thread about long-term archiving. The original thread is important enough not to derail it.
This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts. Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline, robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy... [ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :) ]
Kevin Kelly on long-term backups: http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/ The original y2k event: http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/
Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the [re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost knowledge.
You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in price.
SJ
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2009/5/4 Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu:
It seems to me that you are joking, but I was seriously thinking about cooperating with the Long Now project on long term preservation of Wikipedia.
No joke, I thing the long term preservation of knowledge is a very worthy cause.
Printing Wikipedia on acid-free paper every year or at least decade in several copies dispersed on several continents should ensure that the contents last for several centuries at least. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive either and it could gather some media attention (= sponsors).
Acid-free paper won't last for several centuries without decent storage, and we're talking about a small library worth of paper. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes - and that's just the English Wikipedia. Include other languages and other projects and you have a very sizeable amount of content.) That kind of storage isn't particularly cheap. Air tight containers in a cave might work pretty well though - caves have very stable temperature, and the air tight containers would control humidity - and the caves already exist so no need to spend money constructing somewhere.
For a really long term, a cooperation with some brickworks, where a brick printer would be introductd in the brick producing process, so that Wikipedia (and other important works) would be printed on every brick produced. We know that Sumerian tablets have lasted for thousands of years, so these bricks would surely last that long too.
And for even longer, do the same with bottle manufacturers.
Yeah, bits and pieces would survive a long time, but you wouldn't get any significant portion of the projects saved that way. If you got it written on bricks that were being used to build a building you have good reason to believe will be around a long time, then it might work, but you would need a lot of bricks.
According to the page I linked to above, the English Wikipedia has 7,484,527,350 characters. Let's assume an 8pt font (any smaller and it becomes difficult to write or read easily) on a standard brick (which Wikipedia tells me is, in the UK, 215mm by 65mm), that's about 18 lines of text and maybe 17 words per line. That's about 300 words per brick (I'm assuming only one face will be written on). That works out at 25 million bricks. That's well over 1000 typical houses just for one copy of one project. Since the vast majority of these bricks aren't going to survive you are going to want massive redundancy. I don't think it is practical.
Engraving on bottles isn't going to work - the bottles will (hopefully!) get recycled.