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Wikipedia and the End of Archeology
Andy Updegrove writes "Far too much attention has been paid to whether or not the Wikipedia is accurate enough. The greater significance of the Wikipedia today, and even more for those in the future, is its reality as the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time. Moreover, with its multiple language versions, it also demonstrates how different cultures understand the same facts, historical events and trends at the same time. Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find. In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure-trove for data."
That sounds fantastic in an idealistic, theoretical way...but considering the volatility of Wikipedia just on a day-to-day (sometimes hour-to-hour) basis, what makes anyone think the content of Wikipedia in a decade, much less a century, will say anything about what we were like today?
The advent of the digital age has made storing data for arbitrary lengths of time a possibility; as long as it's maintained, there need be no information loss. But at the very same time, the volatility of the information has skyrocketed, such that information that isn't being constantly maintained is routinely vanishing forever.
Contrast this to past eras, where the capacity for information preservation was nowhere near as comprehensive or as close to perfect as it is today. While at the same time being much less volatile: much of the information we've uncovered from human history wasn't intended to be preserved, it just happened to last.
Not that this is in any way surprising; it is, in fact, a restatement of the fundamental difference between analog and digital. Digital information is either preserved or not, there's no middle ground. Meanwhile, analog information can't be perfectly preserved, but it degrades more gracefully.
Sure, barring some sort of cataclysm, our "important" information will be around in far greater quantity two hundred years from now than anything from two hundred years ago. But how much "unimportant" information will we have irretrievably lost? As diaries are replaced with blogs, and letters are replaced with email, and telegrams are replaced with IMs and phone calls, a huge amount of information that might have survived previously as worn scraps of paper is destroyed as soon as it's consumed, thereby denying a window into the everyday culture of the time to future archeo- and anthropologists.
We'll never again lose the Library of Alexandria, but we'll never again have the journals of Da Vinci.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Itsa me, the firsta posta.
"That belongs in a museum!" *cracks bullwhip, grabbing hat before stone door collapses*
I'm sure that's what the curators of the Library of Alexandria thought, too. Problem is, the library didn't last forever -- nor is the link in my first sentence probably likely to work 150 years from now.
Maybe I'm being too crass. Maybe they're right. Maybe thousands of years from now, people will think that Steve Colbert was the son of God. Who knows.
Either way, I think Wikipediology is a pretty interesting concept. I think that beyond using it as a historical resource, it's fascinating to see how something can grow and change when thousands of people are influencing it. Like the stock market, it becomes an 'entity' of sorts. I think true anthropological benefit would lie in studying how it has evolved.
I think the same could also be said about slashdot. Imagine a study on the evolution of trolls, annonymous cowards, and karma whores. Call it Slashdotology.
--
"A man is asked if he is wise or not. He replies that he is otherwise" ~Mao Zedong
Capitalism: When it uses the carrot, it's called democracy. When it uses the stick, it's called fascism.
Don't we already do enough computer archeology trying to figure out other people's code?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
But we are talking about archeology, which generally deals with ANCIENT things. In a mere 100 years, (minute amount of time for an archeologist), I don't expect any wiki to still be around. By then they should be out-dated and replaced with some newer, better version that might very well not carry over data from the old out dated wikipedia.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I'm assuming that the Wikipedia guys have a slightly better backup system in place.
Where were you when the voynix came?
.. when they find the the discussion section of half the female celebrity entries on the site involve in depth discussions about boob size. Is this really the kind of legacy to leave?
Oh, not about the singularity, but about the future of Software Archeologists. I always loved the descriptions of Pham Nuwen working with software thousands of years old and having to treat it like an archaeological dig.
Or, maybe, 150 years from now, the present content of wikipedia won't be still online, and archeologists will be digging old hardrives out of current landfills and reconstructing bits of the content for those anthropologists to analyze.
I mean, sure, we like to think of some of the online material we have now as permanent, a way to prevent information from being lost and having to be painfully dug up. But then, so probably did the founders of the Library at Alexandria.
How many of you have a floppy disk drive anymore to read your "old" data backups? Or even the OS & program that wrote that data from 15 years ago?That is if the magnetic bits are still there. 50 years from now it will be hard to find a CD player...
How exactly does Wikipedia reflect the state of modern human life? Most humans don't have computers. Most humans don't have Internet access. Many humans don't even have basic sanitation. A better place to look for the real human story is our landfills and cemeteries, as archaeologists currently do when they find an ancient site...
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
This is more relevant to anthropologists, unless you're talking about digging up Wikipedia on old HDs, as a previuos poster mentioned.
Theres one thing that you don't get. People have been saying this for a long time beleaving that newspapers and other sources of information will put archaeologists out of work. A couple of years ago anthropologists and archaeologists got together to do an expirament. They went to two neighborhoods and the anthropologists asked the people in two different neighborhoods about their alcohol cunsuption. The two neigborhoods had were different economic status, and had two different trash dumps. After the survay was done, the poorer of the two neighborhoods said that it had consumed more alcohol, but after archaeologists excavated the two dumps, the opposite was true.
Wikipedia may still be around in 150 years (and up-to-date), so in order to get an accurate picture of 2006 at that time, they will have to consult an archived version.
If anybody thinks archaeology will become the study of decoding disks, mod me up.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I've always thought similar things about time capsules.
There's simply no point in burying time capsules anymore. Reason being, our digitised textual and photographic records of any major time capsule's burial will probably survive just as well as the contents of the capsule itself, if not better. We won't need to dig the things up because we'll already know what's in there, who put it there, and why. It's all on record. So why bother?
qntm.org
That's probably what humans thought when they invented script. Now everything is documented and no doubts will ever arise regarding our time.
Remember that much of Archeology is not unearthing the findings but interpreting them. If you had today complete access to the Library of Alexandria, how much of it could you understand.
Historians and archaeologists will always be needed. And also in the future there might the chance of recording reality and replaying it as virtual reality, which may cause reading Wikipedia or today's multimedia as a very poor experience.
Any system which replaces Wikipedia (if any ever does) will have to carry forward all of that information. It would be silly not to. What would be the point of reduplicating all the work that countless people (and bots) have already done?
There are many Wikipedians who love to delete things that they consider non-notable. It is not a universal repository of all knowledge.
== silly person with neofuturist pleadings for fame based on weak hypotheses. See also Cringely and Dvorak.
Judging from what I've seen, it's more likely that future archaeologists will conclude that our society had a raging epidemic of Tourette's Syndrome considering the high abundance of terms like "FUCK tHIS", "Tyler Scott has a Bigg Dick" or "ThIS iss funn to edit" appearing in the middle of our writings.
Archaeologists and history-writing has long been debated to be dominated by those in power. If Wikipedia can be used for, what the article calls, "Wikipediology", isn't it too dominated by people in power? The entry of Africa is in English and I don't think there are (m)any articles in any African languages. If they were, weren't they going to be different on content than the English entry?
You can take any country. As the article praises the meanings of having different opinions about the same thing in Wikipedia of different languages, IMHO Wikipedia is far more prone to have sceptical views about anything to be worth anything related to study of demographical point of views.
Um the Mongol, Roman, Aztec empires are all gone. How long will our civilisation last after oil becomes scarce?
And someone's predicting the end of archeology? What makes anyone think we'll be able to power the machines required to serve the web pages. Our entire civilisation (including agriculture) is based on abundant energy.
Deleted
This hope is still affected by the same things that affect accuracy. If an article in Wikipedia is only edited and maintained by a few interested parties (or the U.S. Congress) then it will be no less necessarily representative of societies views than it will necessarily true.
In fact, Wikipedia's champions can hope for nothing more than being representative of societies views. How is wikipedia going to tease out the truth of something that we don't know the answer too/can't agree upon? It won't, no more so than Britannica will.
Why is Wikipedia a better anthropological resource than Britannica? Because it's more comprehensive? From an anthropological point of view, it seems that advantage may well be outweighed by the uncertainties in the processes underlying it's development (even though this doesn't outweigh the fact that it's comprehensive if what your looking for is a good quick first reference).
Of course, it could be very useful if what you're trying to understand is "how people collectively write encyclopedias."
"...Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure trove for data."
Incredibly valuable resource? Yes. Excellent cross-cultrual-reference (a la Rosetta Stone)? Yes. Outstanding resource to create a partial context on other facts? Definitely. fundamentally new and useful type of resource for researchers investigating tins century not available to those investigating earlier centuries? Absolutely
Complete fact base? NO. Replacement for physical archaeology? NFW.
Just the statement in the intro that digs are being done for research into 150 years ago demonstrates the point. There were plenty of books and encyclopedias from that time that survive, and create the same kind of context and cross-cultrual-references. Yet they still have to dig.
It is a good point that Wikipedia is a new type of esource, but this sounds like the geek version of the flat earth society -- "everything revolves around where I stand".
I've been explaining to people how Wikipedia is not inaccurate, as any controversial topic shows a history of changes, often replete with links that can serve as additional help in understanding the topic and how it's seen in different cultures, among people belonging to different fractions and so on - but apparently asking an encyclopedia user to read the content that is not a single version of the article "published" at the moment it's read is a big, big problem.
With all the daily data our society gathers and plugs onto a hard drive these days...I think an online collaborative encyclopedia isn't going to be the place anthropologists look to understand the lives of the past. What with youtube...who knows how many video clips of what not...how could anyone question how we lived today?
The submitter is a little -too- optimistic when it comes to historic analysis.
The decades of television and film that are quite simply gone/i> because no one, not even the mega-corps that made some of the stuff wanted to keep them around is an excellent example. What television/movies are still around may not be accesible because the storage media may not be playable for whatever reason.
The wikipedia has the same problems. Maybe not right this minute, but very soon.
Establishing facts 100 years from now will be just as difficult, if not more so because fewer and fewer things are being printed.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
"Wikipedia today, and even more for those in the future, is its reality as the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time."
No, Wikipedia is a record of how Wikipedians understand society. Though I must say it will be nice, 150 years from now, when a member of what's left of humanity, most likely a resident of one of the temperate areas of the globe (the twenty percent or so nearest the poles) not blasted by radiation, will be able to travel the gaslit streets to a building housing one of the remaining computer terminals (the Museum of How We Fucked The World Up Big Time) and check out Wikipedia for evidence of what a lot of shallow, passive, supersitious, self-absorbed shitheads we all were. They will also learn how say some words in Klingon.
If the spelling is hard, skip an alphabet to suit your inferior intellect.
Nice.
Likely way less than 1% of the world's population have ever contributed to wikipedia, and less than 10% have ever read it. It only represents a very narrow cross section of information, culture, whatever compared to what is available in written form or in artefact form.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Too much attention paid to a silly little thing like accuracy? Give me a fucking break. If Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as a true encyclopedia, then accuracy is paramount. No, of course it is not going to be perfect, but the cavalier attitude taken towards accuracy by many is nauseating. All of this other stuff about it being a reflection of "how humanity understands itself" has interest, but that doesn't negate or even make less important the accuracy issue.
I know a lot of people want to get really excited because "information wants to be free" and whatnot, but settle down. Like anything, Wikipedia has its good points and its bad points. Just because it's a great idea doesn't mean that it can't, and doesn't, have some serious flaws in execution.
And before anyone chimes in with "regular encyclopedias have inaccuracies too!", save it. While that is certainly the case, that doesn't let Wikipedia off the hook. Bringing that up is just an attempt to change the subject.
Worst article ever.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Yeah, because that's all just a bizarre modern quirk. No one in the future will post profane things, just as no one before the 20th century ever placed profane messages anywhere, right?
... that Wikipedia and the Library of Alexandria would be compared so much. Wikipedia may be a great encyclopaedic reference, but the near compelte lack of literature on the site means it doesn't begin to compare. A more accurate comparison would just be the Internet with the Library of Alexandria, where the Internet is a far more extensive resource. Just look at the services offered by universities, governments, Google, Wikipedia, etc.
A researcher looking back would be able to find the actual work among sites like Google Books, and then find cultural context for the period on Wikipedia.
Given the constant state of modification, you'd need to take "Snapshots" of Wikipedia and archive them. Say every 2 years or something like that, assuming it continues to be a good resource for many years to come.
And then you'd need to constantly upgrade the archives to the latest media as time progresses, so that you can easily do your research 'digging.'
I agree, though, while many folks don't have access to computers, it's still good insight as to what the "neutral point of view" of a given society is. It's a bit hard to envision, but what is considered neutral now may change with the circumstances of the future.
Discoveries, typically those of a scientific nature, have a habit of changing the way the world views itself. I often read about the discovery of the "new world" only a few hundred years ago. I can't imagine what it was like to grow up not knowing what's on the other side of the ocean. Not knowing what the sun really is. And maybe some day, we'll find proof of life elsehwere in the universe. And that will again change our whole perspective.
But at the moment, we don't have a lot to go on for what the typical person's definitions were of generations past. I think archiving would be a fantastic idea.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Wikipedia's importance is its convenience to people living today as a quick overview of just about any topic under the sun.
Sure, Wikipedia may be useful as a cultural artifact 150 years hence... but by that time the early 21st century will be just a blip on the historical landscape. Only a few thousand academics and hobbyists will care about how we thought of ourselves in 2006, just as only a small number of people today really care or know much about the world 0f the 1860s.
In short, Wikipedia's present value to millions of users today is far more important then its future value to a relatively small number of folks in the distant future. All historical knowledge will be lost eventually - even if the physical data continues to exist, the accumulation of information over the coming centuries will be so vast that a detailed record of any given time will become irrelevant.
What does the guy writing for the "standards blog" know about archaeology? I'd like to hear from real archaeologists about they think whether Wikipedia will be enough to kill their profession.
Wikipedia is almost all text. It will never replace, for instance, the feel of an iPod in your hand, with it's little bud in your ear. Text and data, just like a billion attics full of antiques, will never replace the archaeological shovel.
Or to put it another way, once you get all the data out of a relic, you don't discard the relic. You need both, data and relics.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Name one current data storage medium capable of storing the amount of data required to really give an idea of what's currently going on that will last hundreds/thousands of years. Essentially our version of the ubiquitous stone carving.
I can't think of one. A dvd would be hard pressed to last fifty years given the average build quality, and hard drives just plain don't last that long.
Data will no doubt propagate through history, being changed, updated 'interpreted' and generally messed around with until it gives no more idea about us as petri's pottery shards do about the ancient world. Basically it'll always reflect the views of people regarding us according to their current culteral views, not our view of ourselves, and lets face it, we've done little to impress those who will follow us.
Nope, unless someone finds a permenant and hard wearing storage medium capable of storing large scale data we're pretty much screwed so far as getting our side of things heard in an unbiased fashion. The only thing certain to still hold info from our period in history far into the future is a small gold record attatched to a certain deep space probe.
But like evolution, it's ONLY a theory!!! The reality is that we are in a digital dark ages. Much of the important data that we hold dear to us, or that keep society running, or that even keep people alive just to name a few areas is NOT recoverable in any fashion should we have a nuclear catastrophe. All those data tapes, RAIDs, CD-Rs, DVDs, hard drives, you name it... they are NOT human readable like those scraps of information from our ancestors were. The problem we've got right now is that there is too much information to even be able to store in a physical and human readable form. So I have two proposals:
1. Using genetic engineering and/or nanotechnology we ensure that all humans born past a certain point have nanosensors that can read data in any form and process it before feeding it to the brain. Ideally this human augmentation should be completely biological. However, if nanotechnology is necessary it should be purely mechanical in nature to avoid being wiped out by EMP.
2. We find a way to back up snapshots of the molecular structure of the entire space encompassing and deliver those snapshots via encryption (ideally quantum encryption) to remote data storage facilities at multiple points outside of the solar system. Should a disaster occur, automated attendants will simply be triggered to rebuild the solar system from a recent snapshot at pre-designated locations in the universe. A message would then be sent to the appropriate people on the newly reconstructed Earth to alert them of the nature and cause of the recent devastation that befell the original Earth so that if it was a human caused destruction, the causal trajectory may be avoided. If it was natural, the nature of the event would permit the reconstructed Earth managers to make a decision to revert to an earlier copy should the natural event be too close temporally to do anything about.
You'll have to excuse me. My mind is in a different space as I've been practicing Jala Neti the past few days and my mind is expanding.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Actually, anthopoligists of the future will probably data-mine our email... and conclude that we were a people obsessed with p3n1s enlargement and herbal v14gra!
Anthropology is the study of humanity.
Archaeology is the sub branch of anthropology which studies the physical remains of human societies.
Wikipaedia does not allow us to examine physical remains.
You are probably referring to cultural or linguistic anthropology. I do not know how useful Wikipaedia will be in that regard as it represents the group opinion of only a very small fraction of humanity, almost completely english speaking, white, western, educated, well-off, christians. An old lady in muslim Ethiopia is probably not well represented.
FYI, archaeology is a subfield of anthropology. And text analysis, the sort of which would be necessary to sort through masses of Wikipedia entries (across languages or not), is nothing new (nor is it confined to anthropology -- not remotely). Slapping a new label on something doesn't make it novel, it makes it jargon, and jargon doesn't help anybody.
Also, FTA:
Is a load of crap. I'm not going to claim that there's a strong concensus on what precisely culture is --beyond, of course, that it's a term we have constructed to represent some odd human behavioral patterns-- but I don't know a single anthropologist who would agree with that statement. And I know a lot of anthropologists.
written by a partner in a law firm, undoubtedly to increase their google page rank. there are only apples and oranges here. nothing to truly compare, unless of course we're talking about better devices to reconstruct dead magnetic media. only then could it be called archaelogy.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
if i lived in 106, if i wanted to record something, i would write it down on paper. it would therefore persist for decades, perhaps centuries. if i lived in 3000 bc, i'd write it on a stone tablet. then it would persist almost forever.
but what if it is 1966 and i put it on a computer? well, by 2006, the technology, expertise, file format, and actual reading machines wuld be completely gone. in other words, records from computers from 1966 are less accessible to us than records from 1766 or even 3000 bc
if it were 1706 and i wanted records from 1666, how hard would it be for me to locate and read them? now i'm going to give you a computer tape from 1966. good luck
or howabout it is 2046, and i give you a CD burned from 1996: what's the state of the dyes on that CD in that year? exactly. now compare that to parchment from 1776. sure, it's somewhat decayed, but you can still make out what is written, with your own eyes, no other technology needed
so yes, archeology IS going away. but not for lack of anything getting lost, but for the fact that things are getting completely lost, in a way they never did before: the media is becoming inscrutable to modern eyes, very fast
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I think communication and information are some of the most dangerous weapons humanity has at its disposal right now, and some of its most powerful tools. It is so very interesting to see the aggregate effect of people realizing that information is not always 100% black and white, 1's and 0's. It can indeed be quite gray, and the reasons for the differences in opinion are as varied as the opinions themselves.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Right... sure.
I hope the Wikipedia guys don't break their arms patting themselves on the back. Why in the world would they think any sort of meaningful remnants of Wikipedia will survive intact 150 years from now? If anything, Wikipedia's constant change (particularly on the fringe topics) means it is useless as some sort of "set in stone" archive of any time period.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way
I suspect someone probably *CAN* figure out how to decipher the backup tape of Wikipedia a thousand years from now. We will call that person an archaeologist. Just as today archaeologists recover fragments of paper or papyrus or human femurs, archaeologists a thousand years from now (probably 200 years from now, actually) will recover fragments of disk drives and magnetic tapes and human femurs, and they'll try to figure out all of the same things about us that we're trying to figure out about our predecessors. Resources that have been preserved, like books and Wikipedia histories, will be useful too, just as books from historical times are useful now - but there will certainly be questions that they don't answer.
I'm not sure if you know this, but you're actually supporting the GP's point, and not arguing against it. It wouldn't be the end of archaeology even if 99% of the world's population contributed to Wikipedia, because archaeologists would also care about the other 1%.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
That supposes that
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should.
b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future.
c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to analyze in a distant future may make all but big overviews too much for a human mind. Something like "after the Middle-Ages, the so-called Modern-Ages (1500-2500) developed, with humanity developing a primary state of technology, but still lacking a conscience of ecology. The natural resources were depleted and the balance of Earth was tipped a bit too far, ending in the natural disasters that gave birth to the Interregnum (2500-2900)."
I mean, nobody will be particularly interested in what the US thought about the obesity problem, compared to say, what the Germans did, in the beginning of the 21st century.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Thankfully, archeologists will have loads to work on pre-20thC stuff, so it's not quite the end for Archeology. However, in 10000 years, after we no longer use digital computers, we'll need very advanced archeologists to recover data from defunct machines, buried hard drives etc.
Not all civilisations last forever. Even global ones.
John
The article speaks of the end of Archeology. This is just stupid. When written sources are available, the academic discipline that reconstructs a people's past is called History not Archeology. The only point the article could possibly have is that Wikipedia will become one among many historical sources. What a revelation! How does utter crap like this get posted as a Slashdot article. Wait don't answer that - I had momentarily forgotten that this is no longer a geek news site but rather a page view generator for advertisers.
Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary
Future? hell, it isn't necessary in the present since we have written records going back five thousand years in some parts of the world, and well over 150 years just about everywhere else. Hasn't this idiot heard of writing or history?
the assertion is more true of the whole Internet/online content, not just wikipedia.
In that sense, archive.org will be the information archaeologists scavenging ground
Don't worry about archeology, I am sure that there will be a fascinating publication in 100 years or so about the data recovered from a data center dig that found a semi-intact wiki server. There will probably be a great discourse about how/why or who created all this information and for what purpose.
That the records don't change over time, and that they can be fully trusted and that they will be available 100+ years from now, or 500+ or even 1000+ years. And of coarse that the human race is alive to do Archeology.
That and there is plenty we don't know about earlier pre-wiki ages so I think Dr. Jones and Dr Zahi Hawass and their compatriots have nothing to worry about.
Anyone who thinks Wikipedia is the authortative source for anything is a moron.
;)
Like any standard reference (or other) book, it's something to be dug through for knowledge, and compared with tons of other reference (and other) books. Somewhere in the middle of all that you'll find something that kind of resembles the truth.
Efforts should be made to capture pop culture as it goes by just for the sake of history. It is interesting to think of wikipedia as just such a repository. Provided of course, as already pointed out, a copy of it is still around in 100 years. With technology advancing as fast as it does, there is a real danger of things being left behind and forgotten. The Computer History Museum is an interesting example of trying to capture software before it is lost.
For sale next week on eBay: slashdot UID 3104.
Current owner ruined it when he popped off with some smelly, nasty ol' people-magazine-mindset shizzit about Wikipedia that trashed his I/T cred permanently.
----
Really. People that don't understand the change-tracking mechanism beneath wikipedia really shouldn't spout off like you just did. You end up lookin' like an idiot. Sorry if that's harsh, but there you have it. Even a low UID can't save your ass from that glaring of a dumbass remark.
Now, if you'd just cranked off some insane remarks about conspiracy theories, NASA, politics, explosives or the weather, us slashdotters wouldn't all be staring at you like you just farted in church. But that ship's sailed... good luck on the auction, dude. (attention, moderators: I disabled my own karma and subscriber bonuses before posting, and I didn't take the easy way out with A/C, either. Troll-rate me if you must, but this sort of stupidity needs to be called out in plain terms).
I feel really bad for the future data miner that stumbles across Goat... actually, I don't think I'll even finish saying it. Regardless, those studying our culture hundreds of years from now, they're in for some surprises. On behalf of the past, I offer my condolences.
I'm sure it depends on how thick one's skin was. However, you'd have to be pretty thin-skinned to be offended by what you said, IMO.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
How silly. I already know the future will have bigger problems then archeology.
Just to add to all the other posts above. There's no way that archeologists would ever give up digging. For one, what people write is often far from truthful, complete, accurate, or precise. There are archeologists out there that dig through *current* (let alone 150 year old)landfills and garbage to get accurate data, because of this fact. For example, there's a group that did a study of how much beer the people in a certain community drank regularly: first they asked them to put on paper how much beer they had each week. Then they studied each household's garbage and found that those people drank a lot more beer than they were accounting for.
The other reason for digging is that what people write at one point in time is possibly colored by ignorance, technological limitations, cultural bias, and a variety of other limitations and distortions that a contemporary observer is bound to suffer from. The whole concept is similar in a way to legal trials. Physical evidence always holds a lot more weight than witness accounts. Why? People screw up. A lot.
In the future (30 seconds after I hit "submit" if not sooner)social scientist, including anthropologists and archaeologists, will look to Wikipedia and other online content for useful information. If they have a little bit of training, they will look well beyond a single source. Your comment(s) shows a common misunderstanding as to what is anthropology and archaeology. Anthropology is the study of culture in its broader sense. What people (nominally) do, say they do, understand, and act on this understanding. (Half way jokingly I say that it is the study of "everything"). Archaeology is the study of culture through material remains. Its time horizon is not 150 years or other arbitrary length of time; it is principally one of methods. Also, in the United States archaeology is a sub-field of anthropology (the others are sociocultural, physical or biological, and linguistic). Unlike what you see in movies, the main tool used by archaeologists is statistics, they spend more time running statistical analysis than ingesting dust while shoveling dirt--in fact many never play in the mud. What they look for are patterns in material remains (garbage mounds are a fantastic source of data!) to make inferences about practices of a given culture (place, time, etc.) and often this is at odd with written or oral accounts. An often cited study in contemporary archaeology is the work done by Dr. William Rathje now at Stanford University where he analyzed "garbage." One of the things that comes out of this work is the difference between what people say, and what they actually do: people claim to eat more expensive meat cuts than they actually do, and drink more than they say--in garbage (material remains) one can count liquor and beer bottles, as well as bones and supermarket packaging for meats. For an interesting account of how archaeology is practiced in the United States see James Deetz' "In Small Things Forgotten" (1996). It is quite readable and available at most public libraries (and it is not heavy in statistics as most "real" archaeology is). Indiana Jones? Fun by fictional. Making deductions on a single data source (like Wikipedia)? Bad science!! Always need to use a multitude of sources. If you can't repeat and/or reverify, in never happened or does not exist. This is the case in particle physics, chemistry and... archaeology.
Is this like computers making paper or pencils obsolete?
Wikipedia will just be another source of information.
I think it will always be useful to hold and examine physical objects to help understand them.
The article seems rather naive to me, in several ways.
Updegrove writes:
(Emphasis added.)Mr. Updegrove then goes on to suggest that Wikipedia (or a similar project) is the best way to accomplish this goal. He seems to be confusing "reality" and "a written record", which seems rather naive. A written record contains a representation of reality. Writing is a representation in that the word "spoon" cannot be used to eat soup. The word is just a label attached to the concept (and the concept still is not the thing itself). And writing itself is a representation of perception, in that the writer always writes based on preconceived notions of how to understand reality (or at any rate sensory input, which is probably still not quite the same thing as reality).
In short, there's one heck of a lot of difference between reading about a spoon and actually holding one in your hand.
And even if words offered a direct and unambiguous channel to reality, we'd still be faced only with the reality that people chose to write about. What if you're interested in studying something that nobody wrote about? Or that only got written about a tiny bit? Authors are human, and therefore invariably write from a limited perspective: sometimes they're biased, sometimes they're stupid, and even when they're even-handed and intelligent, they routinely have blind spots that they're not even aware of. Written records are only one source of information about the past. If you want to construct a full picture, it takes more than just that.
Wikipedia is a terrific resource. But it's not the fount of all knowledge and wisdom. Count on it: archeology ain't going to die off because we now have an online encyclopedia.
But the era of "consciously" recording something is (nearly) dead. A few years ago you might find something out and "store" that bit of information so that it was available next time you needed it (say - a recipe for Christmas Pudding). Storage was expensive in terms of time or effort, so it didn't happen to everything. These days storage is not only cheap, it's often automatic. If I want to know what I was working on a year last Thursday it's easy to find out - I think that I last saw a paper diary about 10 years ago, so a year last Thursday is as accessible last week in terms of what was written down at the time.
In thirty years time, we won't be struggling to find out what a particular band sounded like in 2010 by trying to restore rotting CDs or breaking some long-forgotten DRM system - there'll be a thousand and one personal records of every performance still flying around as "live" data, taken using people's mobile phones (or whatever has replaced mobile phones in 2010).
The way that we know what a lot of (British) TV programs in the 1960s and even later isn't because they were "officially preserved" at the time - unofficial audience recordings and tapes "rescued" from bins have had a huge role to play (see http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/missing.htm for a few examples). The future's just like that, only more so.
Mod parent up! I was miffed to read that "archaeologists could replace anthropologists" as all archaelogists are anthropologists too!
Isaac Asimov posited in his "Foundation" series that when a culture/society stops doing research, and only analyzes old research and existing records, it is an indicator of social stagnation and a precursor to the end of that society. I wonder what this means to our society? I am not suggesting this is a sign of the end of Western society, as people are still digging in the ground. I just wonder how this library of thought changes things.
But we are talking about archeology, which generally deals with ANCIENT things.
That's not the definition of archaeology. (wikipedia link for laughs, but standard dictionaries agree that ANCIENT isn't part of the definition)
I think you are wrong here. Changing the storing media won't help as long as it can't be read as a stand alone entity.
The reason why we still can read old texts (either Egyptian, Chinese, Indian or whatever) is that they were preserved in a format directly accessible to humans (like epigraphic or numismatic artefacts).
But even then we need an uninterupted tradition or a kind of Rosetta stone to decipher them, otherwise we are in a situation like with the Indus script were we think it is a script, but we have no proof whatsoever that it really is. Let alone a clue what it say.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
This option is going away. Wikipedia does not make any efforts wrt data retention.
Also, new rules aimed at making wikipedia more encyclopedia-like will likely have a rather strong effect of making it more timeless, (and less useful to sociology researchers).
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is something only time will tell.
...us, and thanks to quantum computers and google's penchant for keeping every bit of info that they can collect, they will probably put it ALL together and know more about us than we do about ourselves. I'm glad that I won't be around to see my great-great grandkids going through my search queries and gmails... ;-(
Or does it show us how wealthy people with plenty of time on their hands understand humanity at any precise moment in time? Not to suggest that most forms of archeology have come any closer to providing a "humanity's eye view," just that Wiki's editors are far from a representative sample of humanity.
digital data will survive longer than paper?
In 5 years the media (any digital media) is usually not common enough anymore. In 10 years there is no device that can read the media that the digital information was written to. How long will we still have IDE for harddrives?
Time permitting, I've been reading John Lukacs' A New Republic, and one of the points he brings up in the book is the change in the nature of being an historian. In more moderns times, as more and more information is recorded (e. g. a minute-by-minute record of what a particular US president does during a four-year term), the difficulty is not finding the information in and of itself, but sifting through all the information to find the things that are actually meaningful.
While Wikipedia may provide a good deal of information to anthropologists, there will always be a draw to archaeology to try to discern what it is we thought important enough to produce a hard, physical copy of. In that respect, archaeology will be important as a means of finding things to help anthropologists interpret what they see on Wikipedia, something of a Rosetta Stone to translate the plethora of heiroglyphics.
I'm not convinced. I think the community of people who contribute to Wikipedia is a culture in itself. So you're not necessarily gaining an understanding of world cultures. You're gaining an understanding of world cultures as they are perceived by the Wikipedia culture. It may be possible to gain more insight about said cultures by looking at their own work through traditional archeology and discovery.
This only partially true - because any archeologist/sociologist worth his salt will quickly realize that Wikipedia reflects only a small subset of the population at large, and via its editorial policies its coverage of various topics is decidely warped. (POV is vital in analyzing literary sources - and Wikipedia's NPOV bias removes traditional POV bias and substitutes a new form.)
Look, I'm sure the Wikipedia's archives will indeed be a treasure trove for historians and historiographers in a century. But their numbers are far outweighed by those who will use the evolving encyclopedia as quick, convenient reference to find introductory information about a topic of choice.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Sure, wiki may offer a cultural snapshot, depending on the proposition underlying the question posed in such an analysis. But that ain't archeology. If the author, a lawyer, would have discussed his wikipedia-as-social-science with an archeologist, or even an anthropologist, he likely would have learned that archeologists don't make "guesses based on random bits and pieces..."; rather they develop hypothesis based on patterns in the distribution of cultural material gathered through the archeological method. And archeologists trained in North America over the past 50 years or so are, in fact, anthropologists first. And, yeah, there are people out there who "...mine (this) treasure trove...", but they are known as looters, not professional archeologists. As an archeologist, I promise to not attempt to explain lawyers without talking with a lawyer first, if lawyers would do likewise with archeologists.
The recently launched website stephansmap.org aims to be more light-weight:
....
It's a wiki with a map, and entries can have a date range.
For example, it allows announcing public events, and following up with a description including photos.
As far as I can tell, wikipedia doesn't really want entries like Critical mass - Boston - October 2006, or
Portland - Marathon - November 2006. Or a hikes directory, or a busroute directory. Or
Stephan
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
The simple fact is that the vast majority of wikipedia articles are written by a tiny handful of people. So I hardly think it is indicative of the thoughts of even industrialized nations, let alone humanity as a whole. Forums and blogs give a much better idea what a fairly large portion of industrialized peoples are thinking.
I hardly think a great portion of humanity is concerned with the intricacies of Star Trek or Pokemon, or the other geeky culture that predominates on wikipedia.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Sometime back I wrote about Digital archeology, and how there are inherent perils with going digital. Case in point: The BBC Doomsday laser disc was not readable only 2 decades after it was made. One one someone rebuilt a BBC computer it was resuscitated. The same goes for early UNIX tapes by Ritchie which were unreadable until someone across the country revived a drive that can read it.
More examples and concerns in what I wrote.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I always loved the multi-language facet of Wikipedia, especially in the context of archeology and linguistics. If I'm unsure about the accuracy of a fact given (unsourced) or whether it's been tampered with I just click on one of the language links, preferably one with a broad user (moderator) base. In general the German or French ones are quite good, though for specific matters other languages may be better. I found that in many political matters the German version was less prone to astroturfing and the like and often the information about controversial subjects is presented in a more clean-cut way (I believe due to their guidelines being a bit more restrictive).
It also helps with problems arising from inaccurate transliteration/translation. Although there is a trend towards representing the correct IPA transliteration with non-English words (e.g. how "Iraq is supposed to be pronounced) there are still many examples where the reader is presented with a very bad transliteration. Hovering the mouse over the corresponding language link and looking at the status bar will yield a better understanding about the word and how it's supposed to be pronounced (unless you can't read the alphabet/characters).
Wikipedia is a great place to brush up on (passive) language skills, even dead languages like Latin or classical Chinese.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
And leave a two-handed, two-finger salute to the anthropologists of 2156 that will mine this "treasure trove" for data.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
hilarious ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure trove for data.
We have plenty of written records (letters, diaries, commmentaries, commercial documents, etc.) of daily life from most periods of history, including Rome, Greece, the Middle Ages, and 150 years ago. Archaeologists still dig because those records are not sufficient by themselves.
Wikipedia will be useful to archaeologists, and it will provide information that other sources won't, but it won't obviate the need for digging. And, I suspect, our E-mail records, chat transcripts, surveillance recordings, webcams, and other traces will be far more interesting for understanding daily life than Wikipedia.
One of the basic premises of archaeology (and one that has been discussed exhaustively in the literature) is that it provides kinds of information that written sources (including even vast electronic ones like Wikipedia) simply can't.
... the contents of one privy, no matter how interesting, do not a cultural portrait of an entire people make." Yes, archaeology wants to learn how people lived, but the idea of monolithic "peoples" fell out of favor decades ago, and for good reason. The fundamental complexity of archaeological evidence makes it complimentary, and often oppositional to written history. Just because written history becomes more plentiful does not mean that it is more accurate and does not need such a counterbalance.
The reasons this is true are plentiful: First and foremost, -ALL- written history, as a product of human action, is necessarily filtered and distorted by the cultural understandings of those doing the writing. In the case of WIkipedia, this would be primarily young English Speaking middle/upper class people wealthy enough to own a computer. Notice how this leaves out the undrstandings of at least 75% of the people in the world. The quote Upgrove uses - "The Wikipedia is the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time" is really a dodge - by eliding all culture to humanity, he doesn't have to deal with the reality of the complexity of human experience of the world.
This isn't to say, of course, that archaeological evidence (material culture)doesn't suffer from it's own problems. Yes, there are problems of preservation, but even more importantly, physical evidence itself has to be interpreted, and the act of excavating and recording it by nature destroys much of its informational value. But in very important ways, physical evidence is much more objective than textual recording (this is why physical evidence counts for so much more than hearsay in court cases).
That having been said, if you approach it right, you can learn a lot from physical evidence that you simply can't from textual sources. Upgrove tries to get around this by alleging that archaeology is all about seeking generalities - "analyses such as these obscure the true purpose of archaeology to begin with
History has shown us that technology evolves through several stages:
:::use::: on it.... It's very easy to look back and see paper as more polished because all of the "rough" years have been lost to history.
Idea --> Refinement --> Maturity.
This holds true for everything from software to toasters. A new idea breeds a (generally poor) initial implimentation, which becomes refined with time and as each refinement brings less and less of an improvement, it reaches maturity.
Paper didn't reach it's level of maturity overnight, clearly it took centuries if not millenia of experimentation over what types of paper worked best, how to make it, inks, size, thickness....developing written languages to
Now consider the digital age. It's true, data from the 60's is probably harder to recover then form the 1800's. However one has to keep something in mind: the digital age is quite new and is still going through that polishing stage. Evidence of that polishing is around...realiablity has improved drasticly, and the move has been towards open data storage formats that don't become a mystery the momment a single company goes bankrupt.
And as a previous poster mentioned, consider for a momment how the capacity for infinite reproduction changes things...more eggs, more baskets.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
that's the first time i've heard those words used, maybe changing perceptions of just how important a tool it's becoming?
"if i'd known it was harmless, i'd have killed it myself"
I think the point it that it's very possible (maybe even very likely) that whatever "better" tool replaces wikipedia will only keep the latest version of the old wikipedia.
from TFA: "And the contents of one privy, no matter how interesting, do not a cultural portrait of an entire people make."
Too much listen to yoda you have!
Because we all know how true-to-life TV, newspaper, magazines, and school text books have been.
Precisely!
Let's say we encode the wealth of human knowledge (or at least the important parts) on a series of silicone ceramic disks (shaped like a CD or what have you), which are then read by a simple (but small) mechanical device. They are encoded onto the disks using as simple a method as we can muster - let's say something like Morse code, but modified to take into account all UNICODE characters. Let's say they have a capacity of several hundred kilobytes. The simple mechanical device which reads them would act as a typewriter - you insert a piece of paper into it, crank a wheel, and it transliterates the disks into English.
These disks are stored (let's ignore the technical infeasability of this for a moment) in a hermatically sealed vault, able to withstand a 9.0 earthquake, amongst other things. It is burried deep into the side of a mountain.
The records themselves are stored in sequential order: that is, records such as ancestoral languages and records are stored in the front, near the entrance, and clearly marked as such. This goes all the way to the present, covering the history of the world up to modern thermodynamics, biology research, and what have you. The disks which show how to translate from one language to another are near the front as well, right by the oldest texts. Also stored in this tomb are several of the machines required to read the disks.
An eon passes, and an archeologist from some future industrialized culture finds the tomb. However, it has been looted at some point, and coincidentially the disk reader had some materials which made good tools, and only sparse and damaged parts of the readers were found. Say, a total of 7/8ths of a machine was able to be reconstructed, but they still were unable to get it to work. Many of the disks were also damaged, used as tools, knocked out of order, and generally left in a messy array. All but a couple hundred of the disks are found intact, however. But the order to properly read them is not known - even though each disk does not require another to be read (ie each is independent from the other, like volumes of an encyclopedia).
The only thing the parts of the machines provides for them is knowledge of what precisely the disks were: a recorded medium. Without the machine, they'd have had little clue, as there is nothing distinctive about the marks on the disks to demonstrate that they weren't simply part of a fabrication process.
Archeologists toil to try and figure out the meaning of the disks. They're able to determine that some form of encryption was employed and toil for years trying to figure it out. Unfortunately, they are unable to figure much more than the fact that there are multiple distinct groups of disks based on pattern, and despite massive support from their government, they're forced to give up.
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Why the fuck would Google having their greedy hands in Wikipedia be a good idea?
Not to belabor the point, but you happen to be wrong, as any archaeologist will tell you. There are many, many, many archaeological digs going on of sites dating from the late 1800s. Now how would you explain that? Andy
"archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists" In the US All archaeologists are anthropologists. In Britain I believe that it enjoys more distiiction.
Case in point - I'm reading Walter Shirer's 1245 page tome on the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. He had to sift through 10,000's of captured documents to distill the complete picture down into his book.
While the 1245 page Rise and Fall covers a period of about 40 years, the source data only covered a period of probably 25 years, and that was the era immediately preceding the information age.
Think what happens when someone wants to research the Second Gulf War for historical fact, background, and rationale. (Hint, I bet his initials won't be GWB.)
You know what the history tab is used for?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There is definately validity to some of the points made by the author, especially regarding the way individual events or artifacts may be defined differently across cultures, but there is one gaping hole in the argument. Unless someone is archiving every Wiki entry, every day ad infinitum, the present view for the anthropologist to consider is only the present view. Since the content can (and does) change frequently, the anthropologist would need to be able to view the entry as it existed at an earlier point in time to be sure s/he is viewing culturally relevant views for the era being studied.
I'm sure some entries would not change significantly, but imagine for a moment that Wikis were available starting in early America. Would you expect the entries for "slave," "slavery," or "slave owner" to read the same then as it would read during the Civil War (a period during which Union and Confederate netizens would constantly be revising the entries) or even as they would read today?
I will also reaffirm other comments that have been made regarding the maintenance of electronic recods as compared to paper, stone, or other earlier means of recording. While the ability to migrate data should become easier over time, and whereas online storage may eventually eliminate the need for individual backups to physical media, the rate of loss between platforms/media types is still dreadfully high (for most users, not those of you prone to migrate everything to multiple locations every time a new option is available).
Overall, a good, quick read, and I appreciate the author's optimism about the value of the Wiki. I just hope to live long enough to see whether or not this view pans out.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Because there's only like 5 billion people in the world that have no access the wikipedia. But the people in the future won't care about them, they'll be more interested in a synopsis of some obscure anime title.
Although TFA is interesting, it horrendously conflates archaeology, cultural anthropology, historiography, and several other 'ologies and 'ographies. Not to mention the dramatic differences between how we approach the study of history and prehistory, texts and physical remains.
Archaeology, although often informed and assisted by historical texts and contemporary analogs, is primarily concern with understanding the physical record and its disposition. There are many interesting studies of Wikipedia and other data sources going on as we type. I overheard many interesting conversations mention it by name at least year's AAA meeting (American Anthropological Association). Although there's much to be learned from texts and the factors that form them (electronic or otherwise), archaeologists are still digging, and will for some time. At least until humans transcend corporeal form and stop depositing junk everywhere we go. Seriously, it's not that unusual to spot modern urban archaeologists picking through trash dumps and landfills. The physical record is teaching us about things from the last 20-30 years that history texts already got 'wrong', so-to-speak.
Also, see circletimessquare's comment regarding the persistence of the physical record (or lack thereof). That's becoming the archaeologist's Soviet Russia joke.
You are both supporting and countering his argument. What about all those missing TV programs from the 60's? There are still a lot missing, as I recall. The recovered stuff wasn't 'live' in the sense that everyone was still sharing it - it was gasping for breath at the bottom of a dustbin.
So, in 50 years everyone has thrown away their Brittany Spears CD's, or even kept them. Most did not bother to back up their TB's of crapo music (or whatever) on magnetic platters(ugh!) to holostorage. Most "Modern" people of the time don't even particularly care about Brittany - if they even know who she is. There is a filtering mechanism working here. Sure, you might be able to go find a dusty old NAS box in some forgotten basement that has a goldmine of interesting stuff on it, but you might not, either.
It is relatively unsupportable to say that we will have this great nice archive of data 'live' and floating around when most people won't want to access it - if they even know about it.
Sure, what's popular and/or cultish will be preserved that way. And lots of stuff won't. Try getting a copy of "The Story of English" on DVD. (Try getting it on VHS! It's listed on Amazon, but you can't actually get it because it's out of print. And what's in print, if you get a used copy, is "protected" by Macrovision.) Let me know where I can download it, please.
For that matter, see if you can find a bona fide copy of the "The African Queen" on DVD. Yes, there are bootleg copies. Your quality may vary.
And that's just video. How much music is lost because it never made it from LP to CD?
Meanwhile, the media companies are ensuring that digital and even analog recordings are controlled with various forms of DRM. They're getting what they want. There's support for it even in the Linux kernel, and iTunes hasn't exactly been hurting for customers. Even as digital reproduction gets cheaper and easier, it's being undermined and sabotaged and prosecuted. Does anyone see that trend reversing?
Makes it great. You can say, well Wikipedia anonymouses said it.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
As the Morse code-like UNICODE implimentation (again, basically Morse but with slightly longer namespace to account for more characters) has no known key, or target to try and translate it to. Such an encoding is incredibly simple, but makes translation all but impossible without knowing what you're trying to get out of it or having a known target. This applies for any computer-readable language: it's an encoding, and often a very complex one.
Hmmm so the creator of the archives went to great effort to build an archive capable of withstanding a 9.0 earthquake fabricate data storage and encoding that would last thousands of years, but forgot to scribble on the wall...
I really like the idea for these disks... the only thing I'd add is to avoid is making the disks pretty so there worthless as jewelry. Forget about some handy reader make the encoding readable by '17th century' microscope
The archivists would be _much_ better off creating, say, nine much cheaper repositories (1) three per continent, each archive having triplicate copes of every volume. (One highly accessible (next to the front door), one moderately accessible (behind a corridor filled with concrete) one very inaccessible (as moderately but say each disk individually sealed inside a massive concrete block so you would have to chip away the whole block to extract a complete set of disks.). Each repository would have the location of two others on different continents, set up in three separate, so if a hypothetical knowledge destroying cult found a repository would have a hard time getting to the others and would only know where a thrid of them were
(1) The main cost in creating these disks is the set up, once that is done you may as well make 30 while your at it or why not 300? forget about hermetically sealing the store just find lots of remote dry caves in geologically stable areas
there is more about this sort of thinking at the The Long Now Foundation I particuarly like the The 10,000 Year Clock
Yes, yes, the idea isn't perfect, but I came up with it on the spot and didn't bother to revise it. The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I don't buy it. In the end, what we're talking about isn't much more complicated than a simple subsitution cipher (the only difference being the use of codes composed of a variable number of individual elements). It should be possible for anyone reasonably competent in the art of cryptography to reverse engineer the encoding format, or at least enough of it to get to the bit that describes the encoding format in detail...
I respectfully disagree. Or rather, I might agree with you, but I'm not sure that it matters, or that it's really a criticism of Wikipedia per se.
Compare a Wikipedia page to the more conventionally understood "cultural windows." The number of people whose contributions are represented in any WP page is far greater than the number who really have creative control over a film, book, or scholarly article. Yet we have no problem using books -- written by a single person, in many cases -- as links to our cultural history. A Wikipedia page has to be superior to that, particularly since even if it is only made by a few hundred people, the (alleged) aim of those people is consensus.
So while Wikipedia may not be great, because it's still only representative of a very small fraction of the population at a given time, it's probably one of the best things we have. I wouldn't want some future researcher to be doing all their research by looking at WP's edit histories, but there are a lot worse places they could be looking.
If you've ever studied the history of Ancient Greece, you quickly come to discover that much of our knowledge of that era is filtered through the minds and perspectives of a very few individuals; the ones who wrote the only extant histories. Herodotus, Pausanias, Diodorus, Jerome (probably a bunch more that I'm forgetting); you can practically count your 'reliable' source material on the fingers of your hands. And in some cases the authors don't really even make any promises of reliability or attempts at unbiased reporting. Although having primary sources that represent one person's opinion is valuable as a single datapoint, our understanding would be far greater if we had something like an Ancient Greek Wikipedia to work with, showing us how public opinion (even if it only represented the opinion of an elite) changed over time. Can you imagine reading the edit history of an article on Darius I of Persia? It would be fascinating, to say the least.
Would something like Wikipedia be the best possible way to understand a long-distant culture? No; but would it be a good way, quite possibly better than many of the ways we use to understand past cultures today? Certainly.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The point was to illustrate the shortcomings of digital media, regardless of how durable the medium is.
I'm with julesh here I don't buy the 'in 1000 years time they won't comprehend ASCII' argument, one could point to Indus script as a proof that formats can become unreadable, OTOH the other three 'first civilisation scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs Mayan glyphs and Linear B) have been deciphered and that that gives linguists the experence to construct a superior 'Rosetta Stone' designed specifically to talk to distant decendents.
I think you have made the opposite case rather neatly... Robert hooks (17th Cent) microscope was able to resolve cells say ~10um so make use a laser to engrave 10um^2 bits into the ceramic disks thats about 1 million bits/cm2 which means you could get about 14Mbytes on a CDRom sized media. Thats 14Mb of text accessible to a 17th centuary technology, (10um bits are a bit small though larger bits would be much more durable) a simple binary to text lookup table could be included on the back of every disk pretty much solving the fragile media, loss of readers and obsolete formats problems the only real problem left is language drifting to the point of incomprehensibility...
Similarly, when NASA reported that it had lost certain footage from the moon landings due to some combination of old data formats and Ark-of-the-Covenant-style warehousing, someone pointed out that we'd still have the footage if NASA had simply put it on the Web. Many private individuals and impromptu organizations would've pounced on the data and "automatically," from NASA's perspective, kept its format up to date. Not to mention doing various analyses and remixes of it, and maybe shutting up the conspiracy theorists.
Revive the Constitution.