![]() |
This is an essay.
It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
![]() | This page in a nutshell: The preservation or survivability of the world's knowledge is at stake. Contribute it to Wikipedia before it's too late. |
Practically every day, distinct forms of knowledge are lost forever and no copies are available. When a natural disaster hits a region or a war breaks out; libraries, archives, museums, monuments and other artifacts of heritage, valuable buildings, incunabula and unique objects are destroyed or face the threat of destruction. These events usually remove pieces of human knowledge and sometimes entire cultures.
There are plenty of examples of permanent loss of knowledge before Wikipedia's existence. The following is a non-exhaustive list.[1]
Unfortunately, the destruction of knowledge has not ceased with Wikipedia's inception in 2001. Here are a few examples.
Today, many of the world's languages are endangered or nearly extinct.[52][53] In some cases where parents have stopped teaching an endangered language to their children, the language is understood by only a few elderly speakers. The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of material on the nearly 7,000 known human languages.[54]
Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.[55] Those websites work in many cases as references. Projects like the Internet ArchiveorWebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team[56] save copies of some of them, but many others are lost forever. This issue may affect Wikimedia projects too, and mirrors are needed to assure long-term preservation of the data.
Wikipedia and its sister projects can—and must—save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images and recordings to Wikimedia Commons, preserving languages in Wiktionary and transcribing books into Wikisource. Events like Wiki Loves Monuments may help to immortalize monuments around the world before they are damaged or destroyed.[57]
There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.