Wikipedia and the End of Archeology 256
Andy Updegrove writes "Far too much attention has been paid to whether or not the Wikipedia is accurate enough. The greater significance of the Wikipedia today, and even more for those in the future, is its reality as the most detailed, comprehensive, concise, culturally-sensitive record of how humanity understands itself at any precise moment in time. Moreover, with its multiple language versions, it also demonstrates how different cultures understand the same facts, historical events and trends at the same time. Today, archaeologists are doing digs to understand how people lived only 150 years ago, making guesses based on the random bits and pieces of peoples' lives that they find. In the future, that won't be necessary, as archaeologists are replaced by anthropologists that mine this treasure-trove for data."
Oblig (Score:2)
Hope Springs Eternal (Score:2)
Library at Alexandria (Score:2)
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e.g. you're depending on
MediaWiki
HTTP server
IP network
Physical network
Server
Electricity
National Grid
Re:Library at Alexandria (Score:4, Insightful)
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It would requre a comparatively short disruption of human society, on the order of years to decades, to lose the technology to read contemporary DVDs; in the time it may take to recover that technology, even if it is also on the order o
Evolution (Score:2)
And we all know that the encyclopedia is 100% spot on. No matter how much all translations and versions contradict each other. Like the bible.
Maybe I'm being too crass. Maybe they're right. Maybe thousands of years from now, people will think that Steve Colbert was the son of God. Who knows.
Either way, I think Wikipediology is a
Re:Evolution (Score:4, Funny)
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Son? Why limit the possibilities?!?
Oh no (Score:2)
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The question is, will any computer still host it. (Score:2)
But we are talking about archeology, which generally deals with ANCIENT things. In a mere 100 years, (minute amount of time for an archeologist), I don't expect any wiki to still be around. By then they should be out-dated and replaced with some newer, better version that might very we
So what will they think... (Score:2)
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In the future, it might be different - cosmetic changes of body composition and apparent age might be trivial rather than elaborate, dangerous rituals as practiced today.
Maybe Vinge is right (Score:2)
Or... (Score:2)
Or, maybe, 150 years from now, the present content of wikipedia won't be still online, and archeologists will be digging old hardrives out of current landfills and reconstructing bits of the content for those a
God, I hate techno-elitists (Score:2)
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If anything, it will be a ju
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Time capsules (Score:2)
I've always thought similar things about time capsules.
There's simply no point in burying time capsules anymore. Reason being, our digitised textual and photographic records of any major time capsule's burial will probably survive just as well as the contents of the capsule itself, if not better. We won't need to dig the things up because we'll already know what's in there, who put it there, and why. It's all on record. So why bother?
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Is that the point of time-capsules, to preserve information? I always thought it was more of a prompting for self-analysis, that the items were carefully chosen to pass onto the future, and then placed beyond casual meddling from those who would rethink their contribution to the record.
It seems to me you could have a high-tech time capsule but storing a bunch of photos, music, and letters on a hard drive, encrypted. You'd need some method of creating a time-lock, so the data can't be altered or retrieved
But Wikipedia deletes stuff! (Score:2)
The internet is what? 20, 25 years old? (Score:2)
And someone's predicting the end of archeology? What makes anyone think we'll be able to power the machines required to serve the web pages. Our entire civilisation (including agriculture) is based on abundant energy.
"...not necessary.." BS (Score:2)
Incredibly valuable resource? Yes. Excellent cross-cultrual-reference (a la Rosetta Stone)? Yes. Outstanding resource to create a partial context on other facts? Definitely. fundamentally new and u
Finally, nicely articulated (Score:2)
Doubtful (Score:2)
The decades of television and film that are quite simply gone/i> because no one, not even the mega-corps that made some of the stuff wanted to keep them around is an excellent example. What television/movies are still around may not be accesible because the storage media may not be playable for whatever reason.
The wikipedia has the same problems. Maybe not right this minute, but very soon.
Establishing facts 100 years from now
Far too much attention? (Score:2)
I know a lot of people want to get r
Archival (Score:2)
And then you'd need to constantly upgrade the archives to the latest media as time progresses, so that you can easily do your research 'digging.'
I agree, though, while many folks don't have access to computers, it's still good insight as to what the "neutral point of view" of a given society is.
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Of course getting that full db dump for just en.wikipedia is getting close to a Terabyte now, but it is at least in theory possible. The only reason you w
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Yes, but will they care? (Score:2)
Wikipedia's importance is its convenience to people living today as a quick overview of just about any topic under the sun.
Sure, Wikipedia may be useful as a cultural artifact 150 years hence... but by that time the early 21st century will be just a blip on the historical landscape. Only a few thousand academics and hobbyists will care about how we thought of ourselves in 2006, just as only a small number of people today really care or know much about the world 0f the 1860s.
In short, Wikipedia's prese
Is this guy even an archaeologist? (Score:2)
Not in a million years (Score:2)
just one teensy problem (Score:2)
I can't think of one. A dvd would be hard pressed to last fifty years given the average build quality, and hard drives just plain don't last that long.
Data will no doubt propagate through history, being changed, updated 'interpreted' and generally messed around with until it
right. (Score:2)
Archaeology != Anthropology (Score:2)
Archaeology is the sub branch of anthropology which studies the physical remains of human societies.
Wikipaedia does not allow us to examine physical remains.
You are probably referring to cultural or linguistic anthropology. I do not know how useful Wikipaedia will be in that regard as it represents the group opinion of only a very small fraction of humanity, almost completely english speaking, white, western, educated, well-off, christians. An old lady in muslim Ethio
this is sensationlist spam (Score:2)
the reverse is true (Score:4, Insightful)
but what if it is 1966 and i put it on a computer? well, by 2006, the technology, expertise, file format, and actual reading machines wuld be completely gone. in other words, records from computers from 1966 are less accessible to us than records from 1766 or even 3000 bc
if it were 1706 and i wanted records from 1666, how hard would it be for me to locate and read them? now i'm going to give you a computer tape from 1966. good luck
or howabout it is 2046, and i give you a CD burned from 1996: what's the state of the dyes on that CD in that year? exactly. now compare that to parchment from 1776. sure, it's somewhat decayed, but you can still make out what is written, with your own eyes, no other technology needed
so yes, archeology IS going away. but not for lack of anything getting lost, but for the fact that things are getting completely lost, in a way they never did before: the media is becoming inscrutable to modern eyes, very fast
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Of course, there's always printouts...
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Well, just to nit-pick, you'd write it on a clay tablet, and then it wouldn't even last as long as the paper -- unless roaming barbarians happened to burn your city to the ground with you in it, thereby purely by chance baking the clay.
Oh no it isn't -- archaeology isn't going anywhere anytime in the next few millennia. Consider that even at a major site like Troy, only about 1% of
No... (Score:4, Insightful)
In thirty years time, we won't be struggling to find out what a particular band sounded like in 2010 by trying to restore rotting CDs or breaking some long-forgotten DRM system - there'll be a thousand and one personal records of every performance still flying around as "live" data, taken using people's mobile phones (or whatever has replaced mobile phones in 2010).
The way that we know what a lot of (British) TV programs in the 1960s and even later isn't because they were "officially preserved" at the time - unofficial audience recordings and tapes "rescued" from bins have had a huge role to play (see http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/missing.htm [televisionheaven.co.uk] for a few examples). The future's just like that, only more so.
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Meta Discussion (Score:2)
I think communication and information are some of the most dangerous weapons humanity has at its disposal right now, and some
Um, no. I think not. (Score:2)
I hope the Wikipedia guys don't break their arms patting themselves on the back. Why in the world would they think any sort of meaningful remnants of Wikipedia will survive intact 150 years from now? If anything, Wikipedia's constant change (particularly on the fringe topics) means it is useless as some sort of "set in stone" archive of any time period.
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I'll live.
Now, please explain to me how my comment is incorrect. Do you really expect Wikipedia to survive 150 years? Really? Because judging from how I can't seem to find Web artifacts from 10 years ago in many cases, 150 years is just plain silly.
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Besides, even if Wikipedia survives that long,
Or, you know, better yet, post it on Wikipedia.
That's rather short sighted (Score:2)
a) The data will be preserved. There is no particular reason why it should.
b) The data will be understood. There are many languages of the past that we cannot understand. The same will probably will be true in the future.
c) They will have an interest. For us our particular time is interesting, but are we also interested in, say, the political views in the Kassite dinasty in Mesopotamia?. And that period took four centuries, surely many interesting things happened. The quantity of data to a
not just WP (Score:2)
In that sense, archive.org will be the information archaeologists scavenging ground
We've got bigger problems ... (Score:2)
One more to call BS... (Score:2)
Preserve reality? (Score:2)
The article seems rather naive to me, in several ways.
Updegrove writes:
(Emphasis added.)
Mr. Updegrove then goes on to suggest that Wikipedia (or a similar project) is the best way to accomplish this goal. He seems to be confusing "reality" and "a written record"
"how humanity understands itself" (Score:2)
Or does it show us how wealthy people with plenty of time on their hands understand humanity at any precise moment in time? Not to suggest that most forms of archeology have come any closer to providing a "humanity's eye view," just that Wiki's editors are far from a representative sample of humanity.
hahaha (Score:2)
In 5 years the media (any digital media) is usually not common enough anymore. In 10 years there is no device that can read the media that the digital information was written to. How long will we still have IDE for harddrives?
I disagree (Score:2)
While Wikipedia may provide a good
Mostly true. (Score:2)
The Technology Cycle (Score:4, Insightful)
Idea --> Refinement --> Maturity.
This holds true for everything from software to toasters. A new idea breeds a (generally poor) initial implimentation, which becomes refined with time and as each refinement brings less and less of an improvement, it reaches maturity.
Paper didn't reach it's level of maturity overnight, clearly it took centuries if not millenia of experimentation over what types of paper worked best, how to make it, inks, size, thickness....developing written languages to
Now consider the digital age. It's true, data from the 60's is probably harder to recover then form the 1800's. However one has to keep something in mind: the digital age is quite new and is still going through that polishing stage. Evidence of that polishing is around...realiablity has improved drasticly, and the move has been towards open data storage formats that don't become a mystery the momment a single company goes bankrupt.
And as a previous poster mentioned, consider for a momment how the capacity for infinite reproduction changes things...more eggs, more baskets.
-Chris
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Sir, I think you give wikipedia far to much credit
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Instead of opening up copyrights, perhaps a good use for a little chunk of that big bag of cash [slashdot.org] would be to use some sort of viable long term storage for backup snapshots. I don't mean a better backup tape. I mean something like etching the raw binary info onto metal (or whatever) plates nano-engineering style, or some sort of sturdy media that is potentially readable by an electron microscope. Properly contained, might it last for hundreds of millions of years?
Then take a snapshot of the entire archiv
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information that gets used is saved, the rest is eventually lost. on the really long term, that is the ONLY strategy that works because it is technology agnostic. So... to save things long term - make sure people keep using the information.
If people are actively researching 1000 yo copies of information, the systems of the day will store and manage the data. If not, the information will eventually be inaccessible.
So in a roundabout way, we sho
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Unless I'm missing a significant data storage project (which I may be), once the article is changed, the only remaining copy of it is in human memo
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I can't vouch that someone hasn't tampered with it, of course, but that's a whole different story.
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Next time you look at an article in Wikipedia, check the top of the screen for the "History" tab. You can see all the changes that were made to the page.
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You can easily see every version of any article by browsing it.
Even see why it was changed in some cases.
Not sure how many versions they keep - maybe all.
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Nonetheless, I don't think it's going to replace archeology.
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au contraire - it will spawn something completely new. Digging in dirt wont stop I've been using the phrase "information archaeologists" for some time. These will be cultural historians who are informatics professionals.
We will eventually (on the 100 year+) horizon get to the point where all human activity is meticulously logged and trackable.
It will be fascinating to recreate all the actions, meetings, and thought development of early digital-m
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as for governments - with this type of information power, we won't need 'em.
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While the potential to preserve information perfectly for arbitrary lengths of time exists, much (I'd even venture to guess most, if not almost all) of the information being routinely generated is being just as routinely deleted.
As an example, how many times have you been writing a reply or a post on
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To that, I can think to respond in only one way...
:-(
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A picture of goatse and text next to it that reads HAHAHAHAHA YOU GOT PWN'D! BOW BEFORE GOATSE!
Alas, this is the only fragment ever to be recovered from the ancient servers, but anthropologists surmise that the ancient race of man worshiped this icon as some sort of deity.
Oh, I kid, I kid.
Wikipedia is not representative (Score:3, Insightful)
Likely way less than 1% of the world's population have ever contributed to wikipedia, and less than 10% have ever read it. It only represents a very narrow cross section of information, culture, whatever compared to what is available in written form or in artefact form.
Re:Wikipedia is not representative (Score:4, Insightful)
The recording of history has seldom been democratic or representative. For much of the time we have been using written language, it has been the elite (in income or education) who have done the writing.
But I think the original article submitter mistakes history for archaeology. Archaeologists study material culture of the past, and historians study the records of the past. They both try to understand what has gone before, but from different angles. Wikipedia will be of interest to future historians. The server room which houses it will be of interests to future archaeologists.
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You're agreeing, not disagreeing (Score:2)
No more than I was, I'd say (Score:2)
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Thats a good point. Perhaps the diff files from 100 yrs ago might show how certain events changed the story on wikipedia. I think that the face value content might not mean much but the overall changes and at what time did the
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Why, O why don't I have mod points when I can really use them!!! Think of this as a virtual +1 insightful.
I have deep suspicions about long-term information storage. But someone should also note that a lot of what we call material culture isn't represented well in digital forms. The texture of an object, some information about its materials, methods of fabrication - these are things that archaeology can tell us and Wikipedia couldn't - even if it were both reliable and non-volatile. Remember, too, that th
Article profoundly retarded (Score:2)
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Wikipedia is not a repository of learning or human knowledge - it's a Marxist [wordpress.com] propagandist's wet dream [wordpress.com], and its incredible to me how many Slashdotters can blithely tell us that Wikipedia can be compared to real scholarship, when its not allowed to have any scholarship - it's called WP:OR in Wik
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Well, that's true in that you had to be learned to even write at the time, but the "learned people" of the time were often reporting second, third, and fourth hand facts (though often they were the first to report them in writing rather than orally), and freely mixing half-truths, quarter-truth
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No. Review and collection of existing research BY KNOWN SCHOLARS is research. Wikipedia falls at the first hurdle because most scholars, academics and experts refuse to have anything to do with Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia. It's a shoot-em-up game of human history, played on an immense
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No, because its more inclusive in its contributors, and thus (the idea seems to be) better reflects how the people in general living in society view eachother and the subject matter. Particularly if you look beyond the articles to the discussion pages, there's probably quite a bit to that.
But I don't think its going to replace archeology for people studying our time (first of all, because its rather optimisti
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ar-che-ol-o-gy
noun
variant of archaeology
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