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

[Thomas Dalton]

2009/5/5 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> 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.

You are only considering the direct useful of the information
contained, not the historical value it could have in years to come. We
don't research Roman building methods (to pick a completely random
example) because we want to use their methods to improve our own
buildings, we research them to learn more about the Roman people. You
can argue that history is useless, but I would disagree, as would many
other people (historians in particular!).