YouTube, Wikipedia, and Archive.org are the modern day library of Alexandria
YouTube, Wikipedia, and Archive.org are the modern day library of Alexandria
Had this thought the other day and tbh it's horrifying to think about the implications of one, or God forbid all, of them going down.
Stackoverflow too but that only applies to nerds haha
And they are just as fragile.
One of those is not a non-profit foundation, and that's a Problem.
And that one is not really comparable to the library of Alexandria.
i was thinking about how much human effort has gone into making instructional videos on how to do things and how all that content exists almost solely in the hands of Alphabet Corp
I think it’s a bit ironic that Wikipedia hasn’t succumbed to the modern era of misinformation the way other information sources have, particularly given the warnings about it that have been given in the past. Not saying those warnings aren’t warranted, just that the way things have played out is counter to said expectations.
There's an obvious reason for that. Wikipedia is owned by a nonprofit foundation and does not accept advertising.
It definitely has, just not to as large a scale.
In practice it’s ran like a heirarchical aristocracy, where a admins control articles they care about and are very picky about the changes they allow.
One article about an illness contains false information related to alternative medicine “treatments” and I edited it, this was removed by the person who made most of the page. I got into an argument with them, and turns out they have the same username and come from the same country as an account on other platforms selling alternative medicine products, which are subtly advertised on the page they control. They also are a wikipedia admin.
Anyways I reported this to the admin team, and my report was immediately deleted by the admin I was reporting, and I got a three year ban. Mind you I have over a thousand wikipedia edits and have made some big contributions so this was quite annoying.
And this is far from the only incident. The people who are most likely to edit wikipedia pages are those who really care about, or could really benefit from the topic. So you end up having situations where companies hire agencies to improve their image by changing the wikipedia article about them and their products, same thing for celebrities.
Interesting anecdote. Though to judge by your username, it seems you may have an agenda yourself.
So you end up having situations where companies hire agencies to improve their image by changing the wikipedia article about them and their products, same thing for celebrities
This is a major problem that takes up a lot of time for the editors. It explains some of their trigger-happiness.
That said, you have a valid point. I once tried to water down what I considered to be excessively POV language in an article about diet. This earned me an official warning for "extremism" or "conspiracism" or whatever. My impressive account pedigree also counted for nothing. So there's definitely a bit of the political bias, the power-tripping and gatekeeping that you see in any online community. But it's a bit of a conundrum too, because they are fighting an uphill battle against people with strong incentives and sometimes money too.
What's a shame. No way to report him higher in hierarchy?
There is people who watch most popular articles,its not rlly misinformation.
All the more reason to data horde. The costs of storing these libraries are going down, and it is likely that everyone can have their own copy of it all in the near future.
The amount of data is also increasing constantly and by a lot.
The article they linked goes over that. It's a really good read
You can’t rely on YouTube videos staying up over time.
Better download what you want might want to look up again
Can't count on the library of Alexandria staying up over time either
I think we also overestimate the valve if what would have been at Alexandria.
Considering everything would have been hand copied/transcribed back then, and his expensive that would have been, the selection bias would be massive.
I doubt it could compare to Wikipedia.
Let's help PeerTube replace YouTube.
Wikipedia essentially can't be destroyed without a global catastrophe that would mean we have way worse problems. Wikipedia is downloadable. Meaning the ENTIRE Wikipedia. And so there are many copies of it stored all around the planet.
If you have an extra 150 GB of space available then you can download a personal copy for yourself
https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
It's under 25 GB, too.
Having just signed up for storage from Hertzer for nextcloud, that's insane. It'd be cheap as hell to just... Have my own Wikipedia.
I would add Project Gutenberg and Open Street Map to your list.
The heros at [email protected] got our back y'all.
.ml
ಠ_ಠ
Alexandria was important in its time, but in terms of the volume and quality of information we keep on Wikipedia alone, it is a mosquito in the Taj Mahal.
I wish that the Internet Archive would focus on allowing the public to store data. Distribute the network over the world.
In theory this could be true. In practice, data would be ripe for poisoning. It's like the idea of turning every router into a last mile CDN with a 20TB hard drive.
Then you have to think about security and not letting the data change from what was originally given. Idk. I'm sure something is possible, but without a real 'omph' nothing big happens.
Nah, that's the easy part. Checksum technology has been around for many decades
Blockchain? Prolly not a perfect solution by far, but
There was a video I saw (I think it was hank or John Green), where they talked about the implications of twitter being deleted during the start of Elon. They pulled out a joke book they bought of "1000 twitter posts" and said how it would be the only recorded proof they (personally) had of what twitter was.
It's terrifying thinking of just how much information is just being put in the hands of companies that don't care or just on old hard drives about to give out due to funding. I wish there was a way to backup a random part of the information automatically, like a "I'll give you a terabyte of backup, make the most of it" automatically choosing what isn't backuped already.
Also add reddit too, the amount of times I've searched a question and went through 2024 website crap then went back to the search and added "site:reddit" into DuckDuckGo and got an answer instantly.
Add wiki books https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page
Libretexts https://commons.libretexts.org/
And Openstax https://openstax.org/subjects
wikibooks is cool, had no idea that existed. I'm sure next time I get curious at 3am I'll end up there reading about the history of 'vectors' or some other random stuff lol
If we're going to stick to ancient Greek references, one of these is closer to the modern day Augean stables.
There pught to be a decentralized archive of YT. ...and Archive
The problem with YouTube is the sheer amount of storage required. Just going by the 10 Exabyte figure mentioned elsewhere in the thread, there are about 25,000 fediverse servers across all services in total IIRC, so even if you evenly split that 10EB across all of them, they would still need 400TB each just to cover what we have today.
Famously YouTube needs a petabyte of fresh storage every day, so each of those servers would need to be able to accept an additional 40GB a day.
Realistically though, any kind of decentralised archive wouldn't start with 25,000 servers, so the operational needs are going to be significantly higher in reality
I know it's totally subjective, but I wonder how much "non-trash" YouTube is uploaded each day?
Hmm good point. If this was too be anywhere near realistic, there would need to be a way to triage videos by whether they are actually worth archiving
Man, it's gonna suck when Wikipedia burns to the ground twice.
They can't burn all of us (datahoarders)!
AnnasArchive.org is good at backing up knowledge on a large scale. They also have torrents to spread it around a bit.
One of them isn't like the others.