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Where Is The Wiretap Archive?
cfusion asks: "Veterans of the Internet should remember the Wiretap Electronic Text Archive, at one point hosted by wiretap.spies.com and later by wiretap.area.com. It was a gopher/Web site that covered EVERYTHING under the sun, a digital library of sorts, with incredibly rich content. (A quick search of Yahoo for "Wiretap" will reveal the breadth and depth of their archives - everything from U.S. historical documents to texts about UFOs) Anyway, I recently went back to ">wiretap.area.com and found a message saying "No, we don't know where it went." It's gone. My question is really threefold: Where did it go and why? Are there any other Internet-based libraries that host as large a wealth of textual content? Couldn't someone write to the former curator of the site and offer to host it on their own site? Then turn it into a collaborative effort that maintains the sharpest digital library online. Perhaps my question is not so much about Wiretap, but about digital libraries in general. Although I do want to know where Wiretap went, and why someone else can't host it." This is a cool concept. Hopefully it, or something like it, will turn up again on the Net. Update: 04/25 8:45 by J : "It's back up for good," says its maintainer. Hooray!
http://wiretap.area.com/
www.everything2.com is a similar site - it's got tons of great stuff. Please read the FAW before making any nodes - E2 has an experience system, and it would suck for you if your first efforts at noding were, say, voted into the ground by vengeful elder noders :)
I think E2 is probably the best bet we've got for something like this in the future. The ability for all the users to add content makes it easier and faster to get information in there, since you don't have to wait for some group to get around to it. The system of nodes and writeups allows commentary to be put up with the text, and makes it much easier to find.
Besides, it's run right alongside Slashdot - what do you think those [?] symbols are in the stories? They're links to the term on everything2, because Slashdot is using Everything as a dictionary.
There are already a number of public domain texts that are there, and more are being added constantly. I think this should be the best location for any information...
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Anyway, I'm working on a site (anthology.org -- not much to it yet) that will be a directory of online texts. Though, more and more it seems that some sort of active involvement is necessary to support this type of thing -- rather than just cataloging. Shouldn't be horribly expensive as far as major philanthropic activities go $2000 for a RAQ server and $300-500 a month to host it.
BTW, let me know if there are archives missing from my anthology.org list.
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The GREAT BOOKS INDEX at books.mirror.org mirrors many of the texts that were on Wiretap. I think it was their intention to at least mirror all of the literature on the site (as well as provide links to the original archive and the .txt and HTML versions on the net such as at Project Gutenberg ftp sites
There also was a Wiretap mirror at wiretap.spies.com, but I can't tell if it is still there since it seems to be SlashDotted.
Work for Change & GET PAID!
The main problem with history editing is disappearing history. This has been true from www.deja.com's bit-decaying Usenet archive all the way back to the Library at Alexandria.
The only real way to address the disappearing history problem is a shift away from:
- Centralized archives with specialized search engines AND
- A variety of universal web search engines that don't archive
to a variety of universal web search engines that archive.Storage capacity just isn't expensive enough to justify anything but redundantly archived versions of everything ever published on the Web and Usenet. The indexes of such versioning archives are quite similar to the data structures needed for compression anyway, so this is a natural marriage.
I know the Xanadu cover story on Wired a few years ago ended by saying "somethings are best forgotten" but then that article was written by the kind of guys it is generally best to disobey at every opportunity.
Seastead this.
or is this not it: gopher://wiretap.area.com/?
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
If it goes offline again, perhaps this old address could reach someone:I found that address in the comments at http://wiretap.area.com/Gopher/Libr ary/Classic/, dated June 24, 1994 -- the P.O. box may or may not still be valid...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay