Re: [Wikimedia-l] WMF commitment for a Wikimedia projects archive

I saw a recent size estimate of Wikimedia Commons of just over 200 TB. That's large but not astronomical.

With a bit of guesstimation, the hardware only cost of creating a Wikimedia projects digital tape archive might be around $2,000 per archive set, a cost that probably would only be once a year. Using off-the-shelf kit, a similar archive on a set of 10 TB hard disks might end up being double that cost. Archives like this are good for a few years, but in practice a plan would have them periodically tested and refreshed, unless they are being replaced every year with the latest archive.

It is unclear to me why the WMF would not want to make a hearty transparent and public commitment to off-site archives. At least with an independently managed archive in another country, that at least makes it possible that in some bizarre scenario where an extremist US government makes it a federal crime to fail to either 'amend' the Wikimedia database against the values of the WMF, or legally orders the WMF to take down its websites in order to control certain publications, videos or photographs, that WMF employees can appropriately comply with US federal law, but are not be required to do anything about the public archive hosted by a different organization in another country. If such an unlikely scenario came to pass (and the unexpected seems to becoming something to realistically plan for these days), at least the archive could be resurrected for public access within a few weeks by open knowledge organizations who have staff that would never be subject to federal law in the US.

If the WMF honestly does not already do something like this already, and wanted to earmark the relatively trivial sum of $10,000/year for remote archives, us volunteers would be happy to approach a couple of suitable national-level partners in Europe that could easily physically host the archives each year and would probably like the idea of blogging about it, as protecting open knowledge fits their values and commitments.

Any WMF board members interested in asking some questions internally, if the WMF senior management are unwilling to answer this rather simple question publicly?

Thanks, Fae