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

[Anthony]

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.


If you really want to spend your time and efforts based on what "people
still consider worthwhile"...

Oh nevermind.

Obviously, Wikipedia has
> revision histories going back years and, as long as they are
> maintained, I suppose you could just make your own "archive" when you
> wanted to read it. So, I guess all we really need to do is ensure we
> have reliable full history dumps backed up.


It would be nice if deleted articles were made public, though.


> 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.


I would put a pretty large bet on the fact that someone is going to think
they need to keep Wikipedia long past the point where it's worth it to keep
it.  Wrong decisions will be made to delete or oversight content, but
whatever isn't oversighted or deleted will be kept by someone long after its
usefulness has dropped below the cost of maintaining it.  There are lots of
packrats working on Wikipedia.