On 12/4/06, George Herbert <george.herbert(a)gmail.com> wrote:
One could just as easily wonder if
wikipedia.org might
one day dissapear.
Wikipedia at least has the advantage that it's actively mirrored in
several places, probably has hundreds of other copies floating around,
and explicitly encourages further replication.
A friend of mine works for the Internet Archive. They
believe they're
stable and mostly technically/talent limited on growth.
Yeah, I don't think it's really likely to disappear soon, but it would
be nice not to have to rely on third party organisations with which we
have no affiliation. And as I said, it's only a partial solution
anyway - that only works for websites, and ones that were archived at
the right time, at that.
If there's significant concern on these points,
then the Wikimedia
Foundation could form an exchange agreement with the IA, trading
copies of the respective databases, for redundancy.
Hmm, you're suggesting taking a copy of a database consisting of
several terabytes of data is preferable to copying a few webpages?
Think of all that hardware...
Or send some of the $1 billion everyone keeps talking
about thataway ;-)
$0.1 billion, but anyway...
Steve