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

[Brian]

If I'm limited to 17th century technology then I guess my other solution is
out too.
Compressor: Drop Wikipedia into a black hole
Decompressor: Read Wikipedia out of the hawking radiation

Ahh well.

On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>wrote:

> Brian wrote:
> > Wouldn't the most cost effective solution to be to first fund research in
> > compression so fewer bits have to be etched out?
> > In that case these guys are already on the job:
> http://prize.hutter1.net/
>
> The obvious reply to that is that the Rosetta project aims to make an
> archive readable with 17th century technology, which digital
> information compressed with advanced algorithms is not.
>
> They try to make an issue out of the obsolescence of digital
> technology, which I think is overwrought. Just because I don't have a
> slot in my computer where I can insert a 1970s era magnetic tape
> doesn't mean it's unreadable. I don't have a 750x optical microscope
> lying around either. Both media are readable using extant technology.
>
> There have been some problems with restoration of data where the
> decoding software has been lost. But the popular, well-documented
> digital formats of the past are as readable as ever: I have a program
> on my computer called groff which is largely backwards-compatible with
> runoff, one of the earliest digital typesetting formats, dating back
> to the 1960s.
>
> There is still a great deal of extant text dating to ancient times,
> despite the fact that copying was fantastically expensive, and that
> everything was written on flammable materials in a time when flame was
> the only artificial light source. Maybe the future will be more like
> Orson Scott Card's Homecoming series than the dark ages: a future with
> such a weight of carefully recorded and preserved history that
> studying it, even in overview, becomes the work of a lifetime.
>
> Anyone who claims to know what the far future will be like is a
> charlatan. But I think it would be foolish to assume that it will be
> anything like the past.
>
> -- Tim Starling
>
>
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