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Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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[–] 11 points 1 year ago (6 children)

The problem with this solution is that it leaves out the most important part of Wikipedia of all; the editors. Wikipedia is a living document, constantly being updated and improved. Sure, you can preserve a fossil version of it. But if the site itself goes down then that fossil will lose value rapidly, and it's not even going to be useful for creating a new live site because it doesn't include the full history of articles (legally required under Wikipedia's license) and won't be the latest database dump from the moment that Wikipedia shut down.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Some solution is better than no solution. I don't mind having a 'fossil' version for a pinch. We got along okay with hardcovered encyclopedias pre-internet and this is not that different except it still being reliant on electricity. (I have different, more valuable books on hand if we ever wind up THAT fucked.)

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    My point is that the alternative isn't "no solution", it's "the much better database dump from Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation or wherever, the one that a new Wikipedia instance actually would be spun up from, not the one that you downloaded months ago and stashed in your closet."

    The fact that random people on the Internet have old copies of an incomplete, static copy of Wikipedia doesn't really help anything. The real work that would go into bringing back Wikipedia would be creating the new hosting infrastructure capable of handling it, not trying to scrounge up a database to put on it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    Isn't there a way to sync the copy to the current version?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Sure, but are any of these "don't worry guys I torrented a database dump, it's safe now" folks going to go to the trouble of actually doing that? They're not even downloading a full backup, just the current version.

    You need to devote a lot of bandwidth to keeping continuously up to date with Wikipedia. There's only a few archives out there that are likely doing that, and of course Wikimedia Foundation and its international chapters themselves. Those are the ones who will provide the data needed to restart Wikipedia, if it actually comes to that.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Wikipedia is not at risk of being shutdown, the danger is malevolent editors bringing the culture war inside of it and destroying "truth". While it would be great to keep wikipedia as it is, "they" are coming for it, wikipedia doesn't get to be excluded from the war. For now the best we can hope for is that it will survive but the best we can do is save local wikipedia copies in case the worse happens. Which isn't shutdown, but corruption.

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