anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia?

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Steve Franks
> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2008 1:49 PM
> To: FreeBSD Mailing List
> Subject: OT: anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia?
> 
> 
> So call me a sociopath, but times are a bit scary.  I'd like to do the
> 2000's equivalent of the 1960's bomb shelter, and have my very own
> snapshot in case of major local/regional internet disruption, etc.
> 

This is not a silly idea.  For many many years people would spend
hundreds of dollars on a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica
or World Book encyclopedia to have it sit on their shelf gathering
dust (until their kids used it for school, etc.)

The fact that your even asking the question and wanting to do
it is to your credit.

I really feel the big value of doing something like this is to
be able to go back to it, years later, and compare the old
entries on a topic with the current entries on a topic to
see how they have changed.

I also think that solving the technical problems and learning
how to create a wikipedia mirror would be a great learning
experience for anyone.

But, as for the practical value, I would encourage you to read
Asimov's Foundation series to really understand that any attempt
to catagorize and store the world's accumulated knowledge in a
storage medium in a single location is ultimately an exercise in
futility.  Asimov
made the valid point that book knowledge of facts must work hand
in hand with experience to be useful, and experience isn't documentable.
Terminus itself, the entire planet and everyone on it, was the
encyclopedia - the actual encyclopedia that the encyclopediests
were working on, was nothing more than a sham.

Ted