[Foundation-l] Proposal for Wiki Project

[Robert Scott Horning]

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.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning
218 Sunstone Circle
Logan, UT 84321
(435) 753-3330
robert_horning at netzero.net