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

[Brian]

My technology/power of community inspired opinion is that we don't need to
worry about that problem right now. We could recreate all the content in
short order were all the datacenters simultaneously struck by asteroids, and
more feasible long-term storage solutions will present themselves in the
next few decades. Anything we do right now is just going to get replaced.

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:35 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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>
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