[Foundation-l] Long-term archiving of Wikimedia content

[geni]

2009/5/5 Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com>:
> 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

High purity nickel would appear to run into the intrinsic value issue.

The value of including thumbnails is complicated. On one hand it
solves the translation issue since near 3 million will illustrated
articles is unlikely to present a significant translation challenge to
any moderately advanced civilization. On the other hand they take up
more space than pure text.



-- 
geni