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wiKiPedia: a GeNuiNe
hg2g
— miNus the editors
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measures of humor and thoughtfulness, and they were edited to-
gether by the collective effort of the contributors. These projects
— Everything2, H2G2 (which was overseen by Adams himself),
and others — are like a barn-raising in which a team of dedicated
volunteers organize the labors of casual contributors, piecing to-
gether a free and open user-generated encyclopedia.
These encyclopedias have one up on Adams’s
Guide:
they have
no shortage of space on their “microprocessors” (the first volume
of the
Guide
was clearly written before Adams became conversant
with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far out-
stripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reli-
able storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle’s Internet
Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web
— the
whole
Web, give or take — every couple of days since 1996.
Using the Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can now go and see
what any page looked like on a given day.
The Archive doesn’t even bother throwing away copies of pages
that haven’t changed since the last time they were scraped: with
storage as cheap as it is — and it is
very
cheap for the Archive,
which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off
of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on pack-
ing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco’s
Presidio — there’s no reason not to just keep them around. In fact,
the Archive has just spawned two “mirror” Archives, one located
under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amster-
dam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keep-
ing his only copy of the “repository of all human knowledge” on
the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-
happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a flood-
plain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!]
So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space;
for on the Internet, the idea of “running out of space” is meaning-
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