OT: 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 DAve
> Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2008 9:04 PM
> To: FreeBSD Mailing List
> Subject: Re: OT: anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia?
>
>
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Chad Perrin
> >> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2008 10:05 PM
> >> To: FreeBSD Mailing List
> >> Subject: Re: OT: anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia?
> >>
> >>
> >> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 05:15:39PM -0400, DAve wrote:
> >>> Steve Franks wrote:
> >>>> 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.
> >>>>
> >>>> What would be the best way to go about this.  I see with <1T
> words, it
> >>>> appears doable on current technology.  Maybe they should offer a
> >>>> snapshot on DVDs or disk as a fundraiser?  I'd drop $300 for
> some sort
> >>>> of officially licenced copy, I suspect there are other freaks that
> >>>> would too...
> >>> When the world gets that bad, Wikipedia is the least of my concerns,
> >>> slightly ahead of who is winning American Idol. If it comes to
> >> the point
> >>> the internet goes down for a long period of time, that $300 is better
> >>> spent on a garden.
> >>>
> >>> Just my thoughts.
> >> Actually . . . if things get that bad, you're going to need some
> >> firepower to protect your garden (and everything else you don't want
> >> taken from you by force).  To properly protect a garden, you'd need to
> >> make it a community farm, with community members who have and will use
> >> firearms to protect it (and your Wikipedia mirror).
> >>
> >> Of course, I greatly admire the impulse to protect the collected
> >> knowledge of Wikipedia from disaster.  It's also practical --
> because it
> >> contains a lot of information that might be of use (including good
> >> subsistence gardening information, for those of us who don't have
> >> naturally green thumbs).
> >>
> >
> > If the crash comes and you don't have 4 - 5 years of experience
> > running a garden on your land, plus your own well, your gonna starve.
> >
> > Veggies are very particular as to the kind of soil they like, and the
> > light and water they get.  And it takes several years of trying
> different
> > ones to figure out the ones that do best in your soil.  And most modern
> > veggies are hybrids  and the seed is genetically engineered,
> and patented.
> > Many varieties are, in fact, sterile.  Many others require irrigation to
> > produce sizable yields.
> >
> > To put in a "heritage" garden that will produce given the normally
> > occurring rainfall in your area takes someone with many years of
> > experience in your area growing gardens.  By the time you would
> > be able to get one going from info in wikipedia, you would have
> > died of starvation.
> >
> > Ted
>
> Some of us will have veggies/skills/water for trade. But what he says is
> true. It ain't as easy as read a page, plant a row. If I have a question
> on FreeBSD, Wikipedia is my last resort, after phone calls. While it is
> useful I suppose to some, I would never base a decision on anything I
> read there. It is useful for key words and topics to expand a search
> through better sources, but not much else.

It really depends on what your looking up.  I have found it an invaluable
resource for looking up cultural topics that aren't high on the importance
scale, if you know what I mean.  For example, when the movie Cars
came out, after we bought the DVD one evening after watching it I
got curious about all the Route 66 references and looked up Route 66
on Wikipedia.  It's trivial knowledge of course - is it really important to
know that there's a leaning water tower along I-40, is that something
you would pay for a print encyclopedia for?

> If Wikipedia is killing
> Encyclopedia sales, it is because people are willing to accept
> mediocrity over accuracy if accuracy comes at a price and mediocrity is
> free.
>

People have always accepted mediocrity over accuracy if accuracy
comes at a price.  Where have you been!?!?  :-)

But I don't see that the print encyclopedia articles are that accurate
either, at least, not after time.  Particularly on the controversal stuff.

My parents, bless their hearts, bought a set of encyclopedias the
year before I was born.  Undoubtedly some encyclopedia salesman
got at them.  I got perhaps 2-3 years of use out of them from maybe
5th grade through 7th grade, before the demands on me for accuracy
from school were serious enough that the information in them was
mainly worthless.  Not to mention that these were bought in '65 and
had virtually nothing in them about the Civil Rights movement, let alone
the Kennedy assasination, items that by 1978 were major watershed
events that still had reprecussions.  Items, incidentally, that my
parents to this day really don't talk about (very understandable, as
Republicans they at the time were convinced by that party that
Kennedy was very unimportant) and certainly didn't talk about to me,
items that few teachers in my grade schools talked about either
(due to their extreme controversy, even at that time)  It wasn't until
High School that I even heard about the concept that "everyone
remembers where they were when they heard about the Kennedy
assassination"  There's a parallel here, with 911.

> It has been my experience, maybe things have changed, that a hardbound
> reference book is the equivalent of asking Bunny Watson for an answer,
> and Wikipedia is like asking Cliffy on Cheers.
>

In the county I live in, the public library has the Encyclopedia Americana
online, and anyone with a library card can log in to the system over the
Internet and access it.  So, I don't need Bunny.

Ted