Mailing List Archive

Proposal for Wiki Project
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
Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
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






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Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
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.

--
Robert Scott Horning
218 Sunstone Circle
Logan, UT 84321
(435) 753-3330
robert_horning@netzero.net
Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
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
Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
A levelezõm azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következõeket 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.

--
GNU GPL: csak tiszta forrásból
Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
Robert Scott Horning (robert_horning@netzero.net) [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.
Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
Magosányi Árpád a écrit:
> A levelezõm azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következõeket 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
Re: Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
See [[A Canticle for Leibowitz]]

Fred

> From: Anthere <anthere9@yahoo.com>
> Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l@wikimedia.org>
> Date: Mon, 03 Jan 2005 03:10:10 +0100
> To: foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Foundation-l] Re: Proposal for Wiki Project
>
>
>
> Magosányi Árpád a écrit:
>> A levelezo›m azt hiszi, hogy Robert Scott Horning a következo›eket 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
> foundation-l@wikimedia.org
> http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
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 (lars@aronsson.se)
Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/
Re: Re: Proposal for Wiki Project [ In reply to ]
Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) [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.