Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-10-24/Opinion essay

Opinion essay

There is a deadline

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Emilio (User:emijrp) has been a Wikipedia editor since August 2005, and is a bot programmer and a cataloger of human knowledge. This opinion essay is adapted from his essay Wikipedia:There is a deadline (whose title makes reference to the well-known older essay Wikipedia:There is no deadline).

The views expressed are those of the author only. Responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. The Signpost welcomes proposals for op-eds. If you have one in mind, please leave a message at the opinion desk.

The lost Library of Alexandria. Only one of many destroyed libraries in antiquity. Too late for Wikisource.

*El Vaporcito*, a famous ship in Andalusia and *Property of Cultural Interest* in Spain, sank in 2011 (photo taken in 2007). Wiki Loves Monuments has to go global as soon as possible.

Every day, distinct stores of knowledge are lost forever with no copies extant. When a natural disaster hits a region or a war breaks out, many libraries, archives, museums, monuments and other heritage, valuable buildings, incunabula and unique objects are destroyed.

There are plenty of examples of this from before Wikipedia's existence. The Library of Alexandria, the lost Chinese encyclopedias, churches, monasteries, convents and libraries destroyed during the Spanish Civil War,^[1] a storage vault fire in 1937 that destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 movies,^[2] hundreds of libraries and archives bombed and burnt during World War II,^[3]^[4] more than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries destroyed during the Cultural Revolution along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts,^[5] the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina shelled and burnt to the ground along with thousands of irreplaceable texts,^[6] to name only a few.

Since Wikipedia's inception, the destruction of knowledge has been at least as bad as before. The Iraq National Library and other repositories of culture were looted and burnt during the 2003 Iraq invasion,^[7] the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or utterly destroyed libraries and archives in several countries, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake,^[8] just as with Chilean heritage during the 2010 Chile earthquake. Recently, the Egyptian Museum was looted during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.^[9] But it does not always take a war or a natural catastrophe to endanger knowledge, as illustrated by the Duchess Anna Amalia Library fire in 2004,^[10] or the collapse of the building hosting the Archive of the City of Cologne in 2009.^[11]

These events usually remove pieces of human knowledge and sometimes entire cultures. Today, many of the world's languages are in danger.

Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.^[12] Those websites are used in many cases as references, but while projects such as the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team^[13] save copies of some of them, many others are lost forever.

Wikipedia and its sister projects can and must save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, preserving languages in Wiktionary and transcribing books into Wikisource. Events like Wiki Loves Monuments may help to immortalize monuments around the world before they are damaged or destroyed, but the 2011 edition only covers European countries.^[14]

There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.

Symbol of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, advocating book-burning.
Burning left-wing books during the early days of the Pinochet military regime.
A cello player in the destroyed National Library, Sarajevo, 1992.
Golden toad (Bufo periglenes), now extinct.
Library fire at the Anna Amalia library, 2004
Collapsed Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, March 2009

Footnotes

^ (in Spanish) El martirio de los libros: una aproximación a la destrucción bibliográfica durante la Guerra Civil (Archived September 27, 2011, at WebCite)
^ "$45,000 Fire Drives Families From Homes in Little Ferry", Bergen Evening Record, July 9, 1937, p. 1. Quoted by Richard Koszarski in Fort Lee: The Film Town, Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 339–341. ISBN 978-0-86196-652-3.
^ It Has Been Done Before! Reconstituting War-Ravaged Libraries (Archived September 27, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, Planned destruction of Warsaw and Polish culture during World War II
^ Tibetan monks: A controlled life (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Archived August 30, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Photos of the Iraq National Library 2003–08
^ Haiti Cultural Recovery Project (Archive index at the Wayback Machine)
^ Breaking: Images of Egyptian Museum Damage -UPDATE 34- King Tut Objects Damaged? (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Hilfe für Anna Amalia (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians - Spiegel Online International (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions (Archived October 3, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Archive Team website (Archived October 3, 2011, at WebCite)
^ Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - European website (Archived October 2, 2011, at WebCite)

In this issue

24 October 2011 (all comments)

Opinion essay

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An interesting feature of WP:V, which is really only explained in the additional WP:Published page is that once the last known copy of some work disappears, it can no longer be cited in Wikipedia. The boundaries are even more obscure when it comes to other type of items that must be considered publicly accessible to be verifiable. Uʔ (talk) 10:34, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting opinion, but what's the frog doing there? It's extinct, and a wikipedia article won't bring it back. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 11:03, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

November @ Wikisource: is validation month. Rather than the usual project of undertaking to transcribe a work, it is the month where the focus is on progressing works that have proofread once, to proofread twice or more. Always open for new participants! — billinghurst sDrewth 11:24, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's emblematic of the species that are becoming extinct everyday, many of them without humans ever discovering their existence. In the Golden Toad case, we managed to get some science done. Perhaps we can learn from their extinction. But, if we don't preserve knowledge about their extinction, there is no opportunity to learn. Do you cry for what is lost that was never known or only for that which is known? Is it then better to not know at all? --Hammersoft (talk) 13:48, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

This article underscores the importance of the offsite backup program discussed in the last issue of Signpost. The engineers for WMF should have plans for worse-case scenarios such that Wikipedia is not lost. Wikipedia should survive even if a nuclear bomb were dropped on a WMF server farm or two. As the article shows, libraries do not survive wars. Wikipedia should be able to survive even a nuclear war... literally. Jason Quinn (talk) 16:46, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What astonishes me is that it took the WMF ten years to think "Hey, maybe we should have an off site backup?" --Hammersoft (talk) 18:05, 26 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Why don't we sell DVD sets of the backups for the fundraiser? Actually anyone could do that, as long as they can download the mirrors. Dualus (talk) 18:04, 27 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

- Part of that is that for a long time getting dumps at all was patchy. Wikipedia experienced very rapid growth, and it became really hard to package it up and give it to someone else to keep hold of, especially with the expectation that their copy be kept up to date. The technology needed time (and a lot of hard work) to catch up. - Jarry1250 ^{[Weasel? Discuss.]} 23:27, 27 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I like the addition of an opinion column in the Signpost. I hope it sticks.--Wehwalt (talk) 15:01, 27 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
- Starting with the issue on October 31st, I will be the Opinion Desk manager. I intend on trying my very hardest to ensure that the column does, in fact, continue. I've got one piece for the 31st, a tentative piece for Noverber 7th, and an interesting idea for column for the long term, which I'll roll out the first week that no one's brought anything in. Sven Manguard Wha? 11:43, 30 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]