Wikipedia needs to leave the US at the least. Billionaires and AI pose a threat to all humans, and Wikipedia is no exception.
And the Internet Archive too
However I wonder how this would work. As far as I know Internet Archive have a “Library” status and rights in the US (and only in the US), which grants them rights to archive stuff and have it as download that would be otherwise not legal. That does not mean everything provided there is legal. So leaving the US could actually hurt Internet Archive or the users in the US maybe.
I would be glad if anyone with more insight into this topic could tell me one or two things about it.
It definitely cannot go to the EU. I don’t believe any EU country permits private online libraries.
Plus the entire Wayback Machine would be considered systematic copyright infringement since the Internet Archive doesn’t obtain permission prior to archival. And if you don’t have permission then it is automatic copyright infeingement.
There are still Nordic countries outside the EU. Switzerland appears to be heading in the wrong direction as well, so I might suggest the Seychelles.
Ang go where?
Do theverge have this big font or is something broken on my end?
You can download the entirety of Wikipedia for offline usage, BTW. I do this with an application called Kiwix https://kiwix.org/en/ .
- Click “All Files” on the left menu of the program.
- In the bottom search bar (there is one top and one bottom bar) type “wikipedia” to show only those entries matching the search.
- Then click on the “Size” header to sort all entries by size. Usually the biggest one is the most complete.
- Now “Download” it (i already have it, so it says “Open” for me).
Note that the big one with 111 GB contains images and contains all English language Wikipedia articles. The one with 43 GB should be the same I think, but without images. There are many other variants too, varying in content and theme and even build date. In example the one with “1m Top” contains the top 1 million articles only.
The fact you can download the entirety of the site for 111gb sounds pretty damn impressive to me.
It doesn’t actually include all the media, and – I think – edit history. It does give you a decent offline copy of the articles with at least the thumbnails of images though.
Edit: If you want all the media from Wikimedia Commons (which may also include files that are not in Wikipedia articles directly) the stats for that are:
Total file size for all 126,598,734 files: 745,450,666,761,889 bytes (677.98 TB).
according to their media statistics page.
Nice stats. I always wondered. I get the feeling that ~678 TB is little bit more than ~111 GB.
Like, at least 7GB bigger.
We need a drive that’s at least… Three times this size!
Dear god, are we still using base 2 for file sizes? At least use TiB like a reasonable person.
It doesn’t matter in this case, as long as it is documented (and it is by the unit).
To be clear, I’m fine with RAM being base 2 – it’s rather difficult for it not to be given the structure – but for fixed storage, this is an old-school measurement that only gets worse with each order of magnitude.
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Nobody does that nerd
I don’t remember which is the stupid “1024 bytes in a kilobyte” one but
745,450,666,761,889 byte is 745 terabytes, that should be 745 TB and that 678 should be what TiB is for
And also that entire 677.98 is a useless value, there’s nothing that is “677” about thisIt is if you just truncate! No one should do this, as I don’t recall the last time I saw such a textbook example of “rounding error” meaning “we fucked up while rounding.”
Text is light. Images are a bit heavier, but there’s not too too many.
Thanks for sharing this. Started hosting a local copy of several wiki sources last weekend once this news broke.
Another commenter said downloading is missing out on the best part of Wikipedia, the ongoing editing. Which, while true, is also going to be a weak point.
How many of those amazing editors are going to stick around when their full time job becomes combatting obvious right wing bullshit, when they have to submit gov ID to have an account on the site, and when common sense and fairness becomes a crime?
Wikipedia was a high point for humanity. Whatever comes next I’d like to preserve a little piece of it.
Honestly someone recently posted on the hisoricalness of jesus and the article seemed way different than a few years ago and I would say less accurate. Sorta wish I had downloaded it in like 2015.
Best thing is that it works flawlessly on the mobile apps as well, and Wikipedia also has a 1 million most relevant articles or so, which is just a few gigabytes.
Paywall; DR
You can read it if you add archive.ph/ in front of the link (replace the www with it). It really is a well written article. I also don’t like paywalls, but I like good journalism and as they are still figuring out a way to earn money on the web I also understand their choice for these types of strategies.
