I feel like not enough people appreciate the simple fact that Wikipedia is essentially the most well-organized and complete collection of human knowledge in existence, and furthermore, it's available to everyone who has access to the internet for free in dozens of languages.

There are tens of thousands of individuals collaborating every hour of every day to collect knowledge and share it with the rest of the world purely out of the desire to document and teach, and millions of people spending hours in the Wikipedia rabbit hole learning about subjects that they would have had no opportunity to without it.

Wikipedia is amazing. It's the modern Library of Alexandria.

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[–] ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I agree. And this makes me wonder: of they both disappeared due to some catastrophic event, would it be remembered through the ages in a similar way to the destruction of the Library of Alexandria?

[–] CarbonatedPastaSauce@lemmy.world 11 points 1 year ago

Wikipedia isn’t going anywhere unless most of humanity and our tech is gone. Tons of people take “backups” of it all the time. (Shout out to my fellow datahoarders). If you only get the text, it’s not very large at all.

It’ll easily fit on phones these days.

https://www.howtogeek.com/260023/how-to-download-wikipedia-for-offline-at-your-fingertips-reading/

[–] macintosh@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Internet archive? Likely. It has an archive of a large portion of the beginnings of the internet, which will likely be a major historical source in the future.

Wikipedia? I’m unsure. It’s a collection of information obtained via various sources, most of which would still be extant. Not to put down the work of their project, it is very important. But it’s not impossible to replace like the way back machine.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

Archive is already used as a historical source in some cases, including as the source of many citations on Wikipedia.