Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
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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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Paywall; DR
You can read it if you add archive.ph/ in front of the link (replace the www with it). It really is a well written article. I also don’t like paywalls, but I like good journalism and as they are still figuring out a way to earn money on the web I also understand their choice for these types of strategies.
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Thanks for sharing this. Started hosting a local copy of several wiki sources last weekend once this news broke.
Another commenter said downloading is missing out on the best part of Wikipedia, the ongoing editing. Which, while true, is also going to be a weak point.
How many of those amazing editors are going to stick around when their full time job becomes combatting obvious right wing bullshit, when they have to submit gov ID to have an account on the site, and when common sense and fairness becomes a crime?
Wikipedia was a high point for humanity. Whatever comes next I’d like to preserve a little piece of it.
Honestly someone recently posted on the hisoricalness of jesus and the article seemed way different than a few years ago and I would say less accurate. Sorta wish I had downloaded it in like 2015.
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However I wonder how this would work. As far as I know Internet Archive have a “Library” status and rights in the US (and only in the US), which grants them rights to archive stuff and have it as download that would be otherwise not legal. That does not mean everything provided there is legal. So leaving the US could actually hurt Internet Archive or the users in the US maybe.
I would be glad if anyone with more insight into this topic could tell me one or two things about it.
Fine, split it up in two versions, the US version and international version?
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Isn’t there a way to sync the copy to the current version?
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Isn’t there a way to sync the copy to the current version?
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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Dear god, are we still using base 2 for file sizes? At least use TiB like a reasonable person.
Yes, we all do
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I don’t know but if there’s a way to get from WP only the history from a moment onwards, then it shouldn’t be that hard to update it.
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Dear god, are we still using base 2 for file sizes? At least use TiB like a reasonable person.
I don’t remember which is the stupid “1024 bytes in a kilobyte” one but
745,450,666,761,889 byte is 745 terabytes, that should be 745 TB and that 678 should be what TiB is for
And also that entire 677.98 is a useless value, there’s nothing that is “677” about this -
Like, at least 7GB bigger.
We need a drive that’s at least… Three times this size!
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Wikipedia needs to leave the US at the least. Billionaires and AI pose a threat to all humans, and Wikipedia is no exception.
Ang go where?
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I don’t remember which is the stupid “1024 bytes in a kilobyte” one but
745,450,666,761,889 byte is 745 terabytes, that should be 745 TB and that 678 should be what TiB is for
And also that entire 677.98 is a useless value, there’s nothing that is “677” about thisIt is if you just truncate! No one should do this, as I don’t recall the last time I saw such a textbook example of “rounding error” meaning “we fucked up while rounding.”
