I'm splitting off a separate thread about long-term archiving. The original thread is important enough not to derail it.
This is a big topic, and also one that has been addressed in many different bodies of planning and literature. The Long Now foundation has considered a 10,000-year library project, and their Rosetta Project tests a technique for 5,000-year preservation of texts. Sadly, an earlier forum devoted to these ideas has been taken offline, robots.txt'ed out of the internet archive, and I can't find a copy... [ a long now apparently doesn't require archival public discussion? :) ] Kevin Kelly on long-term backups: http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/20/very-long-term-backup/ The original y2k event: http://www.longnow.org/projects/past-events/10klibrary/ Related research into long-term archival engineering has turned up good ideas: laser micro-etching into nickel provides an excellent price/size/weight point per archived page, and requires only the [re]creation of decent, bootstrappable optics to recover lost knowledge. You could create and distribute etched-plate copies of the 10B words of all Wikimedia text [and thumbnails?] on perhaps 100 thin nickel sheets, for roughly $100k / 50kg / 0.01 m^3 (incl padding). If this laser etching process were scaled up, it would drop significantly in price. SJ On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 6:41 PM, Thomas Dalton <[email protected]> wrote: > 2009/5/4 Nikola Smolenski <[email protected]>: >> It seems to me that you are joking, but I was seriously thinking about >> cooperating with the Long Now project on long term preservation of Wikipedia. > > No joke, I thing the long term preservation of knowledge is a very worthy > cause. > >> Printing Wikipedia on acid-free paper every year or at least decade in >> several >> copies dispersed on several continents should ensure that the contents last >> for several centuries at least. It wouldn't be prohibitively expensive either >> and it could gather some media attention (= sponsors). > > Acid-free paper won't last for several centuries without decent > storage, and we're talking about a small library worth of paper. (See > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_in_volumes - and that's > just the English Wikipedia. Include other languages and other projects > and you have a very sizeable amount of content.) That kind of storage > isn't particularly cheap. Air tight containers in a cave might work > pretty well though - caves have very stable temperature, and the air > tight containers would control humidity - and the caves already exist > so no need to spend money constructing somewhere. > >> For a really long term, a cooperation with some brickworks, where a brick >> printer would be introductd in the brick producing process, so that Wikipedia >> (and other important works) would be printed on every brick produced. We know >> that Sumerian tablets have lasted for thousands of years, so these bricks >> would surely last that long too. >> >> And for even longer, do the same with bottle manufacturers. > > Yeah, bits and pieces would survive a long time, but you wouldn't get > any significant portion of the projects saved that way. If you got it > written on bricks that were being used to build a building you have > good reason to believe will be around a long time, then it might work, > but you would need a lot of bricks. > > According to the page I linked to above, the English Wikipedia has > 7,484,527,350 characters. Let's assume an 8pt font (any smaller and it > becomes difficult to write or read easily) on a standard brick (which > Wikipedia tells me is, in the UK, 215mm by 65mm), that's about 18 > lines of text and maybe 17 words per line. That's about 300 words per > brick (I'm assuming only one face will be written on). That works out > at 25 million bricks. That's well over 1000 typical houses just for > one copy of one project. Since the vast majority of these bricks > aren't going to survive you are going to want massive redundancy. I > don't think it is practical. > > Engraving on bottles isn't going to work - the bottles will > (hopefully!) get recycled. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
