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Wikipedia is amazing (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I feel like not enough people appreciate the simple fact that Wikipedia is essentially the most well-organized and complete collection of human knowledge in existence, and furthermore, it's available to everyone who has access to the internet for free in dozens of languages.

There are tens of thousands of individuals collaborating every hour of every day to collect knowledge and share it with the rest of the world purely out of the desire to document and teach, and millions of people spending hours in the Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about subjects that they would have had no opportunity to without it.

Wikipedia is amazing. It's the modern Library of Alexandria.

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[–] [email protected] 65 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Wikipedia and Archive.org are two of the most fantastic projects in existence. Their contributions to humanity rival NASA imho.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

Oh man, how could I have forgotten to mention archive.org??

My favorite thing on there is the Old Time Radio Researcher's Group who maintain a huge archive of radio shows produced between 1920 and the 1960s (and some from later years as well such as CBS Radio Mystery Theater).

I've been listening through the most well-known shows for about the last 10 years and I still haven't even listened to them all and there are dozens of other more obscure shows!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree. And this makes me wonder: of they both disappeared due to some catastrophic event, would it be remembered through the ages in a similar way to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere unless most of humanity and our tech is gone. Tons of people take “backups” of it all the time. (Shout out to my fellow datahoarders). If you only get the text, it’s not very large at all.

It’ll easily fit on phones these days.

https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Internet archive? Likely. It has an archive of a large portion of the beginnings of the internet, which will likely be a major historical source in the future.

Wikipedia? I’m unsure. It’s a collection of information obtained via various sources, most of which would still be extant. Not to put down the work of their project, it is very important. But it’s not impossible to replace like the way back machine.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Archive is already used as a historical source in some cases, including as the source of many citations on Wikipedia.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are the sites with other top level domains like archive.is the same company? I've seen requests to donate to various Archive sites but I can tell if they are all the same company.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Not sure about these. Archive.org is a depository of free music, videos, books, articles, games and many other cultural artifacts at risk of getting lost to time. One of their coolest projects is the Wayback Machine which backs up pretty much entire Internet. Want to see what first version of Amazon looked like, or browse an obscure geocities page no longer available? Yup, they most likely have it backed up.