BeepBlocking the Internet Archive Won’t Stop AI, But It Will Erase the Web’s Historical Record
9point6I feel like this has been one of my soapbox things for a while now, but
Americans, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia stand as two of the biggest contributions to human knowledge preservation in all of history. To lose either would be a huge backslide for us as a civilization, and it never really seemed like a genuine threat until recent events over there.
I know there’s a lot of other shit going on right now, but you must do what you can to ensure both are able to continue their work.
Already got a copy on my NAS, I update it every year or two when I remember to.
But you’ve missed the point, my personal access to a Wikipedia text snapshot is not equivalent to the free access of information to everyone. The information just existing somewhere isn’t enough.
And anyway a person can’t practically keep their own copy of the Internet Archive. It takes up something like a quarter of an exabyte
iamthetotIt existing somewhere is better than nothing, though. Internet archive on the other hand, that one is a lot harder.
Yes of course
But every single scrap of information in Wikipedia exists somewhere else
Its value is twofold and exclusively these two when you boil everything down:
- It is enough information to answer any question that has an empirically known answer
- It is available to anyone on the planet with ease and without cost
There’s very little else we’ve created that hits both of those, but the second is by far the most important.
But the fact that it’s relatively easy to download and backup makes me confident that someone, somewhere, will rehost it should it go down. Hell, I’d even take a crack at it.
It’s kind of the point of federation, too. An instance can go down but anyone who federated with them will still have that data.