With all of the strategy discussions still on-going, it would be good
to know where the long term public archive of our Wikimedia projects
sits within it.
As has been mentioned on this list previously, when volunteers donate
to the Internet Archive, there is some comfort that their efforts in
helping preserve public domain media will be accessible and archived
for 100 years.
I have been unable to work out what the Wikimedia Foundations
commitment is to maintaining a publicly accessible project archive. I
may be wrong and would love to have someone post a link that puts me
right, but based on past discussions, I suspect that if a project gets
closed or mothballed, there is no specific commitment to fund public
access to any archives. The WMF may be unable to match the 100 year
commitment that the Internet Archive plans for, but it would be jolly
nice to have a commitment to something and have that promoted in the
long term strategy.
The best example I can think of is Wikimedia Commons as this is a
significant size, so committing to maintaining a 10 or 20 year archive
(not just an operational backup) is not an insignificant thing to find
publicly accessible server space for or earmark a specific budget for.
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae