Wifedogging

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Shortcut: WP:TIAD

This page in a nutshell: If the preservation or survivability of the knowledge is at stake, contribute it to Wikipedia before it's too late.

The lost Library of Alexandria, only one of many destroyed libraries in antiquity, lost long before Wikisource had a chance to save their contents.

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, a lot of 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.

Historical instances of loss of knowledge

There are plenty of examples of permanent loss of knowledge before Wikipedia's existence:

• The Libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople are among many great libraries of the ancient world to have been destroyed. As well, many ancient Chinese encyclopedias are partially or completely lost to history.
• Churches, monasteries, convents and libraries were destroyed during Spanish Civil War.
• A storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Film Corporation's pre-1935 movies.
• Hundreds of libraries and archives were bombed and burnt during World War II.
• More than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts.
• 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.
• The original moon landing tapes in high quality have been recorded over and lost.
• ... and many more.

Modern examples of loss of knowledge

Unfortunately, the destruction of knowledge has not ceased with Wikipedia's inception. Here are a few examples:

• The Iraq National Library and Archive and other buildings were looted and burnt during the country's invasion in 2003.
• Part of the collection at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Germany was lost to a fire in 2004, less than two months before the collection was scheduled to be relocated.
• The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or utterly destroyed libraries and archives in several countries.
• The Historical Archive building of the City of Cologne collapsed in 2009.
• On October 26, 2009 GeoCities was shut down, bringing to a close an era that lasted 15 years and removing 38 million user-built pages from the public's view.
• Much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake. 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.
• The historic Egyptian Scientific Institute went through a fire in December 2011.

Future threats

The current coverage of Wikimedia Commons is imbalanced (2.9M geolocated images in the map). We must to preserve the current world to the future generations.

El Vaporcito, a famous ship in Andalusia and Property of Cultural Interest in Spain, sunk in 2011 (photo taken in 2007). Wiki Loves Monuments has to be global as soon as possible.

Today, a lot of the world's languages are endangered.

Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days. Those websites work in many cases as references. Projects like the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team save copies of some of them, but many others are lost forever.

Wikipedia and its sister projects can—and must—save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images 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, but the 2011 edition only covers European countries.

There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.

References

Bibliography

• Lost Memory - Libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century (Archived at WebCite)

Gallery

See also

• Wikipedia:There is no deadline
• Wikipedia:Editing policy
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress
• Lost work, Lost artworks and List of lost films
• Book burning, List of book burning incidents, Nazi book burnings and Library fires
• Destruction of libraries
• Digital dark age
• Category:Historical deletion
• User:Emijrp/All human knowledge
• Impermanence

External links

• Translations for this essay (permalink to original version) are more than welcome: German (webcite), French (webcite), Spanish
• WikiTeam, a volunteers group to preserve wikis