I mean they can try to censor it but I really don't see why the wikimedia foundation wouldn't just move shop to a different country, or a different group just starts running a mirror of it. Like it might be down for a while, at which time we would have to use mirrors, but I can't see any future where its just gone forever.
this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Showerthoughts
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Who are "they"?
Tech bros like musk who capture companies to gut them.
killing all of wikipedia is gunna be almost impossible, theres probably millions of backups around the world. here's a few links to download it, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
I did already, tried the XOWA client to run a local copy on my PC. Wasn't as easy as I hoped but it worked.
Planning to get a couple of USBs stashed away with full copies of Wikipedia and the reader app for knowledge security. You can fit the whole thing with a working installation onto a 128GB USB or less. My install dir was about 69GB total.
additionally not everyone considers to backup the actual software used to compress/decompress the data. that isn’t permanent either and could disappear as well, same as wikipedia rendering such backups useless.
granted, it’s like, 10000x less likely than the already unlikely event of wikipedia being raptured. but the datahoarder mindset is better safe than sorry…
USB sticks will lose the data after a couple of years of not being powered
That's a good point, that is possible but not absolutely certain. I could probably get a smaller version of the wikipedia dump to fit on a BD-R disc but not 69GB.
USB drive or SD card archival might require a 6-month maintenance routine of inserting into a computer and verifying the files are still present etc.
Not only that, but MediaWiki is FOSS, and all existing content on all Wikimedia Foundation (except for a relative few kept on fair use grounds) is at most as restrictive as CC BY-SA 4.0. So you'd have whatever exists on Wikipedia currently (plus Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, etc., keeping in mind too that there are many Wikipedias besides English) plus the software that interacts with that data, other countries which haven't fully descended into fascism, the members of the Wikimedia Foundation, a bunch of pissed-off editors, and a pissed-off public... I think a new, substantially similar non-profit would crop up in the UK etc., and very few things would have to change about the content that's on the platform (where the UK has more restrictive speech laws).
There's more to history than Wikipedia. Like physical books
I didn't even think of that 🤦
I've been online for too long
Back in my day you had to buy Wikipedia. It came in like 20 massive volumes that ate up a shelf or two.
Thinking about it… I wonder what my parents did with our copies…
Still have em! They'll be the last source of actual knowledge once the AI slop destroys us.
The encyclopedia even came on CD for a while. It was called Encarta. But I loved my parent's World Book Encyclopedia much more.
I doubt Britanica has a page dedicated to Limp Bizkit.
And that encyclopedia is online too.
And looking up specific species, animals, conditions
And historians
The US based ones will be silenced because the algo will ignore them.
There are a lot of citations to things like Britannica from 1911 that is archived and public domain.
Wouldn't it make sense to just host the website from another country, outside of US jurisdiction?
Start downloading comrades