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

[Samuel Klein]

They wouldn't take up proportionally more space in etching than they
do on screen.  So an extra 10-20% overall.  They would probably make
the process a bit more expensive, but still to this scale.  an
illustrated encyclo may well be worth twice as much.

Let's see what the Rosetta folks have to say.   I can think of a lot
of people, not least those who have one of the early Rosetta disks,
who would love an  archival etched copy of Wikipedia + Commons thumbs,
which might cover some of the early costs of trying this out.

Håkon: perhaps PrinceXML would be useful for making an etch-specific layout?

SJ

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 8:12 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
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