You can’t kill Wikipedia. MediaWiki is free software. If hosting in the US proves to be too hostile, the foundation can either pack up and host elsewhere, and even if they don’t, anyone else can easily host their own Wikipedia as well.
I’m not here to be a doomer but net neutrality was murdered.
You can download Wikipedia to your computer. It’s big but it’s not an unreasonable download size. Many people have backed it up already!
It’s very unlikely to disappear without someone having a copy.
Better fucking not. Wikipedia is my life bruh.
Download the Downloader / Viewer at https://kiwix.org/.
Get your own backed up copy and keep it on a thumb drive.
Wait surely there’s someone using ai to edit wiki articles? Is that a thing?
Yes, I think that’s the scenario most commenters are missing; Wikipedia could evolve into something it’s not. Then what good are backups as they won’t capture the decades/centuries to come.
You can dowload wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
here’s the torrent: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia
like 20gb when packed, ~90 when unpackedAlso archive.org, idk which one to seed that personally fits my limited storage space, so i’ll just link the category, https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads
there’s also this, but idk about it, just listing options🤷♀️ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
*just in case someone thinks its suspicious: they were all linked directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download under the “Where do I get the dumps?” section
Thank you so much for this. I have been trying to offline Wikipedia for months but the torrent links on the kiwix site are broken or something. They stall out for me in the first 10m everytime. The download from your link is working perfectly.
It’s not going to be much use to you if you don’t have a parser, though there are html dumps somewhere iirc.
Kiwix will parse the en_all .zim file just fine… I’ve got and tested it at this point, the issue I was having is that I couldn’t get Kiwix’s own link to successfully download the file.
Ah, I was just thinking of the sql and xml dumps
books exist
Not for long
If you think Wikipedia is the only place that stores historical knowledge, please, start thinking about how much time you’re spending online.
It is a modern library of Alexandria, free to all globally and community built. It’s genuinely an amazing surviving piece of the old internet. No one is saying it’s the only place, but it is vitally important and a huge deal if it goes away. Shame on you for downplaying that.
Unfortunately it’s not exactly community built, but more like a class of chronically online editors control it and prevent heterodox views and ideas from being added entirely.
I’m not trying to downplay it, but to say it’s the be all and end all of all historical knowledge is factually incorrect and myopic.
Strawman, literally no one said that.
… Literally reread the post. “After they kill Wikipedia history will be ai hallucinations”.
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
To add to that, and to make it easier for some, you can use Kiwix!
but can it run on an ipod 🧐
(actually a pretty cool video btw)
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).
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.
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.
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.
Who are “they”?
Tech bros like musk who capture companies to gut them.
But Wikipedia isn’t a company. It’s a non-profit foundation.
Yes, and Musk this year said he would defund and potentially disband (for being “terrorist orgs”) any nonprofit he didnt like. He was kind of meaning the ACLU at the time but it includes Wikipedia too potentially for the disbanding part
Wouldn’t it make sense to just host the website from another country, outside of US jurisdiction?
There are a lot of citations to things like Britannica from 1911 that is archived and public domain.
deleted by creator
Start downloading comrades
