Hello all, I'm new to the list, but some of you know me from the .En wiki.
Greetings for the new year -- we're now halfway through the Uh-oh's decade, and it seems to be living up to its name quite well.
Against the event of possible REALLY BIG uh-ohs, I would like to propose a project for permanently archiving certain wikis:
*HowDoesItWorkWiki *SpeciesWiki *(Condensed) Wikipedia
By permanent, I am thinking something that could survive the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", even if it struck worldwide and lasted over 100 years. (I hear the movie lasted nearly that long! :-)
The most effective method proven to last over a millenium is clay tablets inside clay envelopes (Thanks, Enki of Sumeria) but there may be something higher-tech today that would work just as well and be less labor-intensive.
This type of idea is always obvious in retrospect. Shall we think ahead?
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#WikiCapsule
Steve
In my opinion, it's a good idea, but one important factor is : in the case of a major catastrophe, how could survivors get access to the saved data ?
Traroth
Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail : 250 Mo d'espace de stockage pour vos mails ! Créez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.mail.yahoo.com/
Good point but let's not talk about it just yet, since it would start a long string of fruitless discussions on the possible nature and scope of the catastrophe, which we can't possibly predict. Who knows?
It's best I think to avoid that entirely and think it two timeframes:
1. Catastrophe survivors (0-20 years) They will need a good survival handbook, followed in the near term by lots of "How does it work?" information, and these should be possible to find even if there's no electricity or municipal authority.
Paper or books in sealed fireproof containers, that sort of thing.
2. Long-term (20-6000 years) Wikipedia on permanent media. "How does it work" is important too. Possible media include: Acid-free paper in an appropriate climactic region (a la Dead Sea Scrolls), (but climate change may make this useless) Engraved messages in hard, corrosion-resistant metal Ceramic (A la Enki)
More suggestions welcome.
Steve
Traroth said:
In my opinion, it's a good idea, but one important factor is : in the case of a major catastrophe, how could survivors get access to the saved data ?
Traroth
Steve Rapaport wrote:
Against the event of possible REALLY BIG uh-ohs, I would like to propose a project for permanently archiving certain wikis:
*HowDoesItWorkWiki *SpeciesWiki *(Condensed) Wikipedia
By permanent, I am thinking something that could survive the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", even if it struck worldwide and lasted over 100 years. (I hear the movie lasted nearly that long! :-)
The most effective method proven to last over a millenium is clay tablets inside clay envelopes (Thanks, Enki of Sumeria) but there may be something higher-tech today that would work just as well and be less labor-intensive.
Steve
One of the best methods of preserving written information that I've seen is to etch the information onto some sort of gold leaf (of various forms of thickness), with perhaps some polymer substrate as an assist.
Indeed some of the best CD-ROM recordings are just that, which is one reason why they last, presumably under archival conditions, for over 100 years.
If you can make the layers of gold thicker, and coat the surface with synthetic diamond rather than the cheap plastics like you have with most common CD formats (some of which are deliberately designed to decay in a matter of months to a couple of years) it could turn out to be something quite permanent. Even scratch resistant to toddlers :) I've heard of ways to deposit thin films of diamond on materials by submersing them in an environment of methane where the material is quite hot, causing the methane to decompose into H2 and leaving the carbon behind on the material you want to coat.
A similar system could also be done (in a somewhat related fashion) where instead of recording the information as a binary format, it would be inscribed with common letters in some sort of micro print that could then be read with a very simple lens system.... something rather low-tech that could even be recreated with very simple medeval level technology.
The advantage of going about a system like this is that it takes advantage of current technology considerations, but does not require a technological infrastructure in order to be read. Other methods of transmitting information on the order of 1000's of years include writing on gold plates, in part due to the fact that gold does not corrode. The real trick is to make the gold somehow unvaluable so that people finding the archived information don't decide to melt the gold down for other things if they don't find the information immediately useful, such as what the Spanish did in Mexico when they found the record vault of the Mayans. The same also happened in Egypt during most of the 19th Century (and earlier).
Clay tablets could provide that sort of stability, especially if you make them ceramic instead, and don't suffer from being super valuable like gold for other things. The #1 problem is that they are more prone to environmental damage and you can't put the detail in so finely as you could with gold (i.e. archiving large quantities of information are pretty much out).
-----------
In terms of something realistic that Wikipedians could do and contribute toward such a project, it would be nice to gather information on how to recreate basic industries. This would include things like how to make steel from nothing but raw iron ore and a few buckets of coal, building an internal combustion engine, basic dam construction, running a water-powered mill (sawmill or grain), or how to harness a horse effectively. Books covering these subjects have been written, but they havn't been updated for a number of years, and assume a technological infrastruction that in many cases doesn't even exist now except in some emerging nations. Besides the doom and gloom scenerios, it could also be a valuable aid for some of these developing nations on how to make stuff and build industries on a comparatively small-scale (a few dozen workers). Once information like this is gathered, finding preservation methods for the information would be much easier to achieve.
A levelezőm azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következőeket írta:
Clay tablets could provide that sort of stability, especially if you make them ceramic instead, and don't suffer from being super valuable like gold for other things. The #1 problem is that they are more prone to environmental damage and you can't put the detail in so finely as you could with gold (i.e. archiving large quantities of information are pretty much out).
I would think that technology of ceramics is advanced enough now that enironmental damage is less concern than with gold. I would also venture to say that creating such ceramics tables needs much more physical world resources than creating wikipages. However is seems possible that companies doing ceramics technology would venture to offer some unnoticeable fraction of their production resources for the wast marketing possibilities of being the one to archive Wikipedia forever.
It would be useful to estimate the quantity of information needed to make live easier after a catastrophy. If it is low enough (I guess it is), we might consider to conserve this set as tables readily useable for print. This way it could reach a much wider population than if it would be written in microfilm size.
Magosányi Árpád a écrit:
A levelezőm azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következőeket írta:
Clay tablets could provide that sort of stability, especially if you make them ceramic instead, and don't suffer from being super valuable like gold for other things. The #1 problem is that they are more prone to environmental damage and you can't put the detail in so finely as you could with gold (i.e. archiving large quantities of information are pretty much out).
I would think that technology of ceramics is advanced enough now that enironmental damage is less concern than with gold. I would also venture to say that creating such ceramics tables needs much more physical world resources than creating wikipages. However is seems possible that companies doing ceramics technology would venture to offer some unnoticeable fraction of their production resources for the wast marketing possibilities of being the one to archive Wikipedia forever.
It would be useful to estimate the quantity of information needed to make live easier after a catastrophy. If it is low enough (I guess it is), we might consider to conserve this set as tables readily useable for print. This way it could reach a much wider population than if it would be written in microfilm size.
I like this idea of preserving basic information in case of a catastrophe. Actually, someone thought about the content on the french wikipedia, but for now, not much work have been given on it.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3ASavoirfaire
See [[A Canticle for Leibowitz]]
Fred
From: Anthere [email protected] Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List [email protected] Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 03:10:10 +0100 To: [email protected] Subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Proposal for Wiki Project
Magosányi Árpád a écrit:
A levelezom azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következoeket írta:
Clay tablets could provide that sort of stability, especially if you make them ceramic instead, and don't suffer from being super valuable like gold for other things. The #1 problem is that they are more prone to environmental damage and you can't put the detail in so finely as you could with gold (i.e. archiving large quantities of information are pretty much out).
I would think that technology of ceramics is advanced enough now that enironmental damage is less concern than with gold. I would also venture to say that creating such ceramics tables needs much more physical world resources than creating wikipages. However is seems possible that companies doing ceramics technology would venture to offer some unnoticeable fraction of their production resources for the wast marketing possibilities of being the one to archive Wikipedia forever.
It would be useful to estimate the quantity of information needed to make live easier after a catastrophy. If it is low enough (I guess it is), we might consider to conserve this set as tables readily useable for print. This way it could reach a much wider population than if it would be written in microfilm size.
I like this idea of preserving basic information in case of a catastrophe. Actually, someone thought about the content on the french wikipedia, but for now, not much work have been given on it.
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia%3ASavoirfaire
foundation-l mailing list [email protected] http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Anthere wrote:
I like this idea of preserving basic information in case of a catastrophe. Actually, someone thought about the content on the french wikipedia, but for now, not much work have been given on it.
Longevity, just like any human project, can only be reached by building on previous experience. Before you can send a rocket to the moon, you will have to build the first rocket, then send the first rocket into the stratosphere, then send a rocket into orbit.
For preserving digital information, there is a lot of experience out there, especially in maintaining software source code over long time. These projects are so many that you can talk already of a "natural selection" among survival strategies. The most commonly cited are "Keep it Simple, Stupid" (KISS) and "Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe" (LOCKSS). Proprietary source code that exists in only one copy can survive only if the company survives, which requires profitable and slowly emerging areas of business. Open source code can survive even if the company goes bankrupt. But survival also requires relevancy. Irrelevant software is not maintained, and easily forgotten during emergencies or relocation. If it goes away, nobody cares to ask for it. Dependence on complicated and immature tools (programming languages, version control systems, filesystems, database formats) can cause the loss of source code.
Good examples of long-lived software is the GNU Emacs text editor (18 years?) and the Linux operating system kernel (12 years?). Both are still actively used, developed, and maintained.
The idea to engrave Wikipedia contents on physical media fails to meet many of these criteria. For example, nobody uses such media in everyday life and the knowledge of how to use them is not widespread. If a mistake is made in the engraving, such that it is impossible to read the contents back, very few people are able to detect this mistake. There is no previous experience in rescueing information from such engravings.
Paper print-out is a little better than engraving, because many people have the knowledge of how to read from paper. There is also plenty of experience (several centuries) from long-term preservation of (acid-free) paper. However, the error rates from scanning and OCR are such that restoration might be difficult or impractical. Paper might be best suited for a printed Wikipedia 1.0 that serves as a printed encyclopedia, since that printout has a use in itself, besides preserving the contents. Paper might be less suitable for preserving the edit history of every article, since nobody would ever read that other than for restoration.
During my 22 years of programming, I have shifted operating systems and programming languages many times, but only once (in 1990) have I shifted character sets (from ASCII to ISO 8859-1). Soon I will shift again to Unicode/UTF-8, which I hope to use for the rest of my life. If I had saved them and copied them to my next computer, I could still read the plain text files I wrote in 1982. Actually, I still keep some print-outs from 1984 and I should retype them before the ink fades away. I still have saved e-mails from 1986 on my current disk.
Wikipedia's current method of distributing digital dumps of the entire database, in combination with keeping the project current and relevant, is the best survival strategy I can think of. Since it has now survived 4 years, we can hope that it will survive 10 years. And when that is reached, we can hope that it will survive for 10 more.
I have a website (runeberg.org) that dates back to 1992. Actually it was on Gopher first, but Gopher sites are not in much use today and nobody cares to preserve them. My site migrated to WWW in 1993-94. The pages are kept under RCS and it is *great fun* to be able to trace more than 10 years of RCS history online, http://runeberg.org/rc.pl?action=history&src=admin/foreign
Lars Aronsson ([email protected]) [050103 21:51]:
During my 22 years of programming, I have shifted operating systems and programming languages many times, but only once (in 1990) have I shifted character sets (from ASCII to ISO 8859-1). Soon I will shift again to Unicode/UTF-8, which I hope to use for the rest of my life. If I had saved them and copied them to my next computer, I could still read the plain text files I wrote in 1982. Actually, I still keep some print-outs from 1984 and I should retype them before the ink fades away. I still have saved e-mails from 1986 on my current disk.
Just scan them in - the scans will take proportionately about as much disk space as the printouts would have on a floppy of the era ;-)
- d.
Robert Scott Horning ([email protected]) [041231 03:00]:
In terms of something realistic that Wikipedians could do and contribute toward such a project, it would be nice to gather information on how to recreate basic industries. This would include things like how to make steel from nothing but raw iron ore and a few buckets of coal, building an internal combustion engine, basic dam construction, running a water-powered mill (sawmill or grain), or how to harness a horse effectively. Books covering these subjects have been written, but they havn't been updated for a number of years, and assume a technological infrastruction that in many cases doesn't even exist now except in some emerging nations. Besides the doom and gloom scenerios, it could also be a valuable aid for some of these developing nations on how to make stuff and build industries on a comparatively small-scale (a few dozen workers). Once information like this is gathered, finding preservation methods for the information would be much easier to achieve.
Now, *that* sounds like a project for Wikibooks!
- d.