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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."
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
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
The recording of history has seldom been democratic or representative. For much of the time we have been using written language, it has been the elite (in income or education) who have done the writing.
But I think the original article submitter mistakes history for archaeology. Archaeologists study material culture of the past, and historians study the records of the past. They both try to understand what has gone before, but from different angles. Wikipedia will be of interest to future historians. The server room which houses it will be of interests to future archaeologists.
Interesting point, and I appreciate the work you put into it, but I disagree. All those physical layers don't matter much with digital information, because changing formats is so easy - as easy as burning a DVD. The achilles' heel of the library of Alexandria was that there was only one copy.
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.
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--