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Essay about the preservation of knowledge
Essay on editing Wikipedia
| 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]
Before 20th century
[
edit
]
20th century
[
edit
]
- Churches, monasteries,
convents
and libraries were destroyed during the
Spanish Civil War
.
[4]
- Most of the
1890 United States Census
materials were destroyed in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. in 1921.
[5]
- A
storage vault fire in 1937
destroyed all the original negatives of
Fox Film Corporation
's pre-1935 movies.
[6]
Furthermore, the vast majority of the
silent films
produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are considered
lost
. According to a September 2013 report published by the United States
Library of Congress
, some 70 per cent of American silent feature films fall into this category.
[7]
- Hundreds of libraries and archives were destroyed
and their contents lost during
World War II
.
[1]
[8]
[9]
- A fire in the
National Library of Peru
destroyed highly valued historical works in 1943.
[10]
- More than 6,000
Tibetan
monasteries were destroyed during the
Cultural Revolution
, along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts.
[11]
- The
National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina
was shelled and burnt to the ground, along with thousands of irreplaceable texts, in the
Siege of Sarajevo
in 1992 during the
Bosnian War
.
[12]
- Some of the original Apollo 11
moon landing
tapes in high quality have been recorded over and lost.
[13]
But all the data was copied as archived in several locations at the time.
[14]
- In June 1981, during the
Sri Lankan Civil War
, the
Jaffna Public Library
was
burnt
by
Sinhalese
Buddhist
mobs, destroying over 97,000 rare books and manuscripts in the process.
[15]
- During the
Romanian Revolution of 1989
, a fire was started in the
Central University Library of Bucharest
and over 500,000 books, along with 3,700 manuscripts, were burnt.
[16]
Unfortunately, the destruction of knowledge has not ceased with Wikipedia's inception in 2001. Here are a few examples.
2000s
[
edit
]
- In 2003, the
Iraq National Library and Archive
and other buildings were looted and burnt during the
U.S. invasion
.
[17]
- In 2004, part of the collection at the
Duchess Anna Amalia Library
in Germany was lost to a fire, less than two months before the collection was to be moved.
[18]
- The
2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
damaged or destroyed
libraries and archives in several countries.
- On 17 October 2004, a fire in the
Parque Central Complex
of Caracas, Venezuela, destroyed the tower's
planoteca
, an archive containing the entire history of the country's public building plans spanning two centuries, including aqueduct and sewer systems.
[19]
- In 2009, the Historical Archive building of the City of
Cologne
collapsed
.
[20]
- On October 26, 2009,
GeoCities
was shut down, removing from public view 38 million pages built by users over 15 years.
[21]
It was only partially preserved by
Archive Team
.
2010s
[
edit
]
- In 2010, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in an
earthquake
.
[22]
Little over a month later, Chile's heritage suffered similar destruction in
its own earthquake
.
- The
Egyptian Museum
was looted during the
2011 Egyptian revolution
.
[23]
- In December 2011, a fire destroyed all but 30,000 of the 200,000 books in the historic
Egyptian Scientific Institute
.
[24]
[25]
- In May 2012, shrines forming part of the
Timbuktu
World Heritage Site
were destroyed by the Islamist group
Ansar Dine
.
[26]
[27]
- Some buildings and churches were damaged in the
2012 Northern Italy earthquakes
.
- In June 2012, many documents were burned during a fire at the secretarial building of
Mumbai
.
[28]
[29]
- Syrian heritage has been damaged
, destroyed and looted during the
Syrian Civil War
.
[30]
- On October 15, 2013, the
Bohol earthquake
destroyed and damaged several iconic sites.
[31]
- On December 25, 2013, the
Santuario da Virxe da Barca
was destroyed by a fire resulting from lightning.
[32]
- The
Al Sa’eh Library
in
Tripoli, Lebanon
, with 80,000 books and manuscripts, was burnt down in January 2014.
[33]
- Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL) damaged
Mosul Museum
artifacts,
Mosul Public Library
books and other
cultural heritage
sites like the ancient temples of
Baalshamin
and
Bel
.
[34]
- In Venezuela, starting in 2010s, due to the economic decline of the newspapers, the transition to the Internet, and growing restrictions on the press, caused the loss of significant parts of media digital archives.
[35]
- On the 23rd of May 2014 The
Glasgow School of Art
, known as 'The Mac' was badly damaged in a fire that destroyed the
Mackintosh library
, a second fire in 2018 finished the job destroying much of the rest of the building and the
O2 ABC arena
, and nightclub next door.
[36]
[37]
- The April 25, 2015,
Nepal earthquake
damaged and destroyed centuries-old buildings in the UNESCO World Heritage sites in the
Kathmandu Valley
, including some at
Kathmandu Durbar Square
.
[38]
- On April 26, 2016,
National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi
and its entire collection were destroyed by fire.
[39]
- A museum dedicated to
Nicola Filotesio
stood in the town of his birth until it was destroyed in the
August 2016 Central Italy earthquake
.
[40]
- A fire
burned down the
National Museum of Brazil
on September 2, 2018, destroying more than 90 percent of its collection of more than 20
million objects.
[41]
[42]
Many holdings, such as records of
extinct languages
, were one-of-a-kind and irreplaceably lost.
[43]
- In March 2019,
Myspace
announced that it had lost all music uploaded between 2003 and 2015.
[44]
- By the late 2010s, several film archives in Venezuela started being damaged and lost due to neglect.
[45]
2020s
[
edit
]
- In January 2020, a fire damaged or destroyed much of the collection of New York City's
Museum of Chinese in America
. Around 35,000 of the 85,000 items had been digitized and backed up before the fire.
[46]
- In April 2021, the University of Cape Town
Jagger Library
was damaged by a wildfire, threatening its collection of African antiquities.
[47]
- On July 29, 2021, the
Cinemateca Brasileira
was hit by a fire,
[48]
the fifth in its history.
[49]
- Many Ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed
as a result of the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
. The
Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum
, the
Kuindzhi Art Museum
, and the
Club 8-bit computer museum
were destroyed by bombardment, while cultural centers like the
Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center
and the
Korolenko Chernihiv Regional Universal Scientific Library
were damaged.
- On 2023-24, in the context of the
Israel?Hamas war
, over 100 cultural heritage landmarks have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip. This includes archives, libraries, and museums, notably the complete destruction of the
Central Archives of Gaza City
.
[50]
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 Archive
or
WebCitation
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.
Articles
[
edit
]
Documentaries
[
edit
]
- Biblioteca en guerra
(2009, Blanca Calvo & Ramon Salaberria)
- Cicatrices de Sarajevo
(2012, Miguel Angel Vinas)
- Digital Amnesia
(2014, Bregtje van der Haak)
- Digital dark age: help, we're disappearing!
(2004, Jorg Daniel Hissen & Peter Moers)
- Internet Archive
(2012, Jonathan Minard)
- Las cajas espanolas
(2004, Alberto Porlan)
- Lost Forever
(2011, Paul Mariano & Kurt Norton)
- Metropolis refundada
(2010, Evangelina Loguercio)
- Rescatando sombras. Cine, muerte y memoria
(2012, Franco Lorenzana)
- The Destruction of Memory
(2016, Tim Slade)
- The End of Memory?
(2015, Vincent Amouroux)
- The House of History
(1996, Quadir Taheri)
Essays
[
edit
]
Projects
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Lost Memory ? Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the Twentieth Century
(
Archived
August 12, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Grima, Noel (23 May 2015).
"Notarial Archives discovery: Documents from Gozo dating to 1431 saved from the bin"
.
The Malta Independent
. Archived from
the original
on 11 August 2015.
- ^
Notes on the history of Birmingham Public Libraries (1861-1961)
, Birmingham, 1962
- ^
(in Spanish)
El martirio de los libros: una aproximacion a la destruccion bibliografica durante la Guerra Civil
(
Archived
September 27, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
US Census Bureau, Census History Staff.
"Availability of 1890 Census - History - U.S. Census Bureau"
.
Census.gov
. Retrieved
2017-10-24
.
- ^
"
$45,000 Fire Drives Families From Homes in Little Ferry
",
Bergen Evening Record
, July 9, 1937, p. 1. Quoted by Richard Koszarski in
Fort Lee: The Film Town
, Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 339?341.
ISBN
978-0-86196-652-3
.
- ^
"Library Reports on America's Endangered Silent-Film Heritage"
.
News from the Library of Congress
(Press release). Library of Congress. December 4, 2013.
ISSN
0731-3527
. Retrieved
March 7,
2014
.
- ^
It Has Been Done Before! Reconstituting War-Ravaged Libraries
(
Archived
September 27, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising
,
Planned destruction of Warsaw
and
Polish culture during World War II
- ^
Carlos Aguirre: El incendio de la Biblioteca Nacional del Peru de 1943
on
YouTube
- ^
Tibetan monks: A controlled life
(
Archived
September 22, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina
(
Archived
August 30, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Original moon walk footage erased
- ^
Not-Unsolved Mysteries: The “Lost” Apollo 11 Tapes
- ^
"Remembering The Jaffna Public Library Destroyed By Sinhalese Extremists"
.
Swarajya
. June 1, 2016.
- ^
The Central University Library of Bucharest
, official site: "the History".
- ^
"Photos of the Iraq National Library 2003?08"
. Archived from
the original
on 2010-04-27
. Retrieved
2012-07-05
.
- ^
(in German)
Hilfe fur Anna Amalia
(
Archived
September 22, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
"
"BOLA DE FUEGO" EXTENDIO EL DANO EN LA TORRE DE PARQUE CENTRAL"
. Segured
. Retrieved
27 January
2018
.
- ^
Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians
- Spiegel Online International (
Archived
September 22, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Shechmeister, Matthew (2009-11-03).
"Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities"
.
Wired.com
. Retrieved
2012-02-20
.
- ^
Haiti Cultural Recovery Project
(
Archive index
at the
Wayback Machine
)
- ^
Breaking: Images of Egyptian Museum Damage -UPDATE 34- King Tut Objects Damaged?
(
Archived
September 22, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Amid army crackdown, Egypt’s richest library set on fire
(
Archived
December 17, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Un incendio durante los disturbios de El Cairo destruye el original de la 'Descripcion de Egipto' encargada por Napoleon
(
Archived
December 19, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Timbuktu's Sidi Yahia mosque 'attacked by Mali militants'
(
Archived
July 6, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Islamists vow to smash every mausoleum in Timbuktu
(
Archived
July 6, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Towering inferno engulfs Mumbai’s seat of power
(
Archived
July 6, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Mumbai government building engulfed in fire
(
Archived
July 6, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Damage to the soul: Syria's cultural heritage in conflict
(
Archived
August 12, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Pia Ranada (October 15, 2013).
"Heartbreaking: 10 iconic churches in Bohol, Cebu damaged"
.
Rappler
. Retrieved
October 15,
2013
.
- ^
"Un rayo destruye un emblematico santuario en Muxia"
.
El Mundo
. 2013-12-25.
Archived
from the original on 2013-12-25
. Retrieved
2013-12-25
.
- ^
"Lebanon Loses 78000 Books To Terrorism: Tripoli's "Al Sa'eh" Library Burned"
.
Archived
from the original on 2014-01-05.
- ^
"ISIS thugs take a hammer to civilisation: Priceless 3,000-year-old artworks smashed to pieces in minutes as militants destroy Mosul museum"
.
Daily Mail
. Retrieved
26 February
2015
.
- ^
Yonekura, Kaoru (2 December 2020).
"Periodicos sin archivos, pais sin memoria"
[Newspapers without archives, country without memory].
Cinco8
(in Spanish)
. Retrieved
2023-06-09
.
- ^
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-27541883
.
- ^
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-44504659
.
- ^
"Nepal landmarks flattened by the quake"
. Retrieved
April 25,
2015
.
- ^
Vidhi Doshi (2016-04-26).
"Fire guts Delhi's natural history museum"
.
The Guardian
. Retrieved
2016-04-26
.
- ^
La Repubblica,
Terremoto nel centro Italia, i danni al patrimonio artistico
- ^
"Brazil's 200-year-old national museum hit by huge fire"
. 2018-09-03
. Retrieved
2018-09-03
.
- ^
"Los meteoritos sobreviven al incendio que ha devastado siglos de historia en Rio de Janeiro"
.
- ^
McCulloch, Gretchen.
"Linguistics Division"
.
All Things Linguistic
. Retrieved
23 April
2020
.
- ^
Tiffany, Kaitlyn (March 18, 2019).
"Myspace, which still exists, accidentally deleted 12 years' worth of music"
.
Vox
. Retrieved
19 June
2019
.
- ^
"Archivo de la Cinemateca Nacional, una historia de deterioro"
.
El Miope
(in Spanish). 2016-04-27
. Retrieved
2024-01-28
.
- ^
Katz, Brigit.
"Fire at Museum of Chinese in America Caused Less Damage Than Initially Feared"
.
Smithsonian Magazine
. Retrieved
2020-02-01
.
- ^
Wroughton, Lesley.
"South Africa wildfire that burned University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities is under control"
.
Washington Post
. Retrieved
20 April
2021
.
- ^
"Incendio atinge unidade da Cinemateca Brasileira na Zona Oeste de SP"
(in Brazilian Portuguese). 2021-07-29
. Retrieved
2021-07-29
.
- ^
"Historia da TV e do cinema queima junto com o quinto incendio da Cinemateca"
(in Brazilian Portuguese). 2021-07-29
. Retrieved
2021-07-29
.
- ^
"Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023?January 2024 ? Librarians and Archivists with Palestine"
.
- ^
The Geograph Britain and Ireland project
(
Archived
July 6, 2012, at
WebCite
)
- ^
"The Endangered Languages Project"
.
EndangeredLanguages.com
. Retrieved
2019-01-16
.
- ^
"Endangered Languages - Ethnologue"
.
Ethnologue.com
. Retrieved
2019-01-16
.
- ^
The Rosetta Project items
from The Long Now Foundation
- ^
Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions
(
Archived
October 3, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Archive Team
website (
Archived
October 3, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- ^
Wiki Loves Monuments 2011
- European website (
Archived
October 2, 2011, at
WebCite
)
- Translations for this essay (
permalink
to original version) are more than welcome:
German
(
webcite
),
French
(
webcite
),
Spanish
,
Portuguese
,
Catalan
,
Italian
,
Nederlands
,
Romanian
,
Swedish
,
- Things get lost. Capture them
(Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 blog post by Elke)
- Photos of destroyed heritage
(Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 blog post) (
Ukrainian version
)
- Joel Aldor wants to preserve historic Filipino architecture one photo at a time
(Wikimedia Blog, 2014)
- 2015 Earthquake in Nepal: A Wake-up Call for Monument Documentation
(Wiki Loves Monuments blog post, 2018)
- Archive Corps, A Volunteer Collective To Help Quickly Save Physical Archives Before They Are Lost
(see also
Archive Team
)
- WikiTeam
? Volunteers group to preserve wikis
- Wikimedia projects edits counter
? Total edits in Wikimedia projects (near real time)
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- Adminitis
- Akin's Laws of Article Writing
- Alternatives to edit warring
- ANI flu
- Anti-Wikipedian
- Anti-Wikipedianism
- Articlecountitis
- Asshole John rule
- Assume bad faith
- Assume faith
- Assume good wraith
- Assume stupidity
- Assume that everyone's assuming good faith, assuming that you are assuming good faith
- Avoid using preview button
- Avoid using wikilinks
- Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense
- Barnstaritis
- Before they were notable
- BOLD, revert, revert, revert
- Boston Tea Party
- Butterfly effect
- CaPiTaLiZaTiOn MuCh?
- Complete bollocks
- Counting forks
- Counting juntas
- Crap
- Don't stuff beans up your nose
- Don't-give-a-fuckism
- Don't abbreviate "Wikipedia" as "Wiki"!
- Don't delete the main page
- Editcountitis
- Edits Per Day
- Editsummarisis
- Editing Under the Influence
- Embrace Stop Signs
- Emerson
- Fart
- Five Fs of Wikipedia
- Seven Ages of Editor, by Will E. Spear-Shake
- Go ahead, vandalize
- How many Wikipedians does it take to change a lightbulb?
- How to get away with UPE
- How to put up a straight pole by pushing it at an angle
- How to vandalize correctly
- How to win a citation war
- Ignore all essays
- Ignore every single rule
- Is that even an essay?
- Mess with the templates
- My local pond
- Newcomers are delicious, so go ahead and bite them
- Legal vandalism
- List of jokes about Wikipedia
- LTTAUTMAOK
- No climbing the Reichstag dressed as Spider-Man
- No one cares about your garage band
- No one really cares
- No, really
- No sorcery threats
- Notability is not eternal
- Oops Defense
- Play the game
- Please be a giant dick, so we can ban you
- Please bite the newbies
- Please do not murder the newcomers
- Pledge of Tranquility
- R-e-s-p-e-c-t
- Requests for medication
- Requirements for adminship
- Rouge admin
- Rouge editor
- Sarcasm is really helpful
- Sausages for tasting
- The Night Before Wikimas
- The first rule of Wikipedia
- The Five Pillars of Untruth
- Things that should not be surprising
- The WikiBible
- Watchlistitis
- Wikipedia is an MMORPG
- WTF? OMG! TMD TLA. ARG!
- What Wikipedia is not/Outtakes
- Why not create an account?
- Yes legal threats
- You don't have to be mad to work here, but
- You should not write meaningless lists
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