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

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> You make a good point, but that point applies just as well to any
> other time capsule plan and people still consider them worthwhile.

I don't.  I think they're fairly silly.

> However, most information isn't lost because of disaster, it is lost
> because people don't think they need it any more and delete/destroy
> it. Can we trust whoever is around in the future to continue to
> preserve the history dumps they've backed up?

Since the data is available to anyone who wants it, it would take only
one person in the whole world to be willing to devote the resources to
preserve the data.  If not even 0.0000001% of humanity wants to
preserve Wikipedia enough to contribute the negligible resources that
would be required to do so, that would indicate to me that either 1)
civilization has collapsed (see above on that) or 2) it's not actually
useful anymore (e.g., it's been superseded by a superior resource).

So no, I really don't think we need to worry about it.  At all.  Not
to the tune of even one dollar out of Wikimedia money.  But if it were
that cheap, of course, you or the Internet Archive or whoever could
volunteer to pay for it.