Steve Rapaport wrote:
Against the event of possible REALLY BIG uh-ohs, I would like to propose a project for permanently archiving certain wikis:
*HowDoesItWorkWiki *SpeciesWiki *(Condensed) Wikipedia
By permanent, I am thinking something that could survive the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", even if it struck worldwide and lasted over 100 years. (I hear the movie lasted nearly that long! :-)
The most effective method proven to last over a millenium is clay tablets inside clay envelopes (Thanks, Enki of Sumeria) but there may be something higher-tech today that would work just as well and be less labor-intensive.
Steve
One of the best methods of preserving written information that I've seen is to etch the information onto some sort of gold leaf (of various forms of thickness), with perhaps some polymer substrate as an assist.
Indeed some of the best CD-ROM recordings are just that, which is one reason why they last, presumably under archival conditions, for over 100 years.
If you can make the layers of gold thicker, and coat the surface with synthetic diamond rather than the cheap plastics like you have with most common CD formats (some of which are deliberately designed to decay in a matter of months to a couple of years) it could turn out to be something quite permanent. Even scratch resistant to toddlers :) I've heard of ways to deposit thin films of diamond on materials by submersing them in an environment of methane where the material is quite hot, causing the methane to decompose into H2 and leaving the carbon behind on the material you want to coat.
A similar system could also be done (in a somewhat related fashion) where instead of recording the information as a binary format, it would be inscribed with common letters in some sort of micro print that could then be read with a very simple lens system.... something rather low-tech that could even be recreated with very simple medeval level technology.
The advantage of going about a system like this is that it takes advantage of current technology considerations, but does not require a technological infrastructure in order to be read. Other methods of transmitting information on the order of 1000's of years include writing on gold plates, in part due to the fact that gold does not corrode. The real trick is to make the gold somehow unvaluable so that people finding the archived information don't decide to melt the gold down for other things if they don't find the information immediately useful, such as what the Spanish did in Mexico when they found the record vault of the Mayans. The same also happened in Egypt during most of the 19th Century (and earlier).
Clay tablets could provide that sort of stability, especially if you make them ceramic instead, and don't suffer from being super valuable like gold for other things. The #1 problem is that they are more prone to environmental damage and you can't put the detail in so finely as you could with gold (i.e. archiving large quantities of information are pretty much out).
-----------
In terms of something realistic that Wikipedians could do and contribute toward such a project, it would be nice to gather information on how to recreate basic industries. This would include things like how to make steel from nothing but raw iron ore and a few buckets of coal, building an internal combustion engine, basic dam construction, running a water-powered mill (sawmill or grain), or how to harness a horse effectively. Books covering these subjects have been written, but they havn't been updated for a number of years, and assume a technological infrastruction that in many cases doesn't even exist now except in some emerging nations. Besides the doom and gloom scenerios, it could also be a valuable aid for some of these developing nations on how to make stuff and build industries on a comparatively small-scale (a few dozen workers). Once information like this is gathered, finding preservation methods for the information would be much easier to achieve.