I completely understand marking the software that controls drinking water as critical infrastructure- but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts …

Just now thought “if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean … and it’s not on the level of safe drinking water, but it is a level.

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GuB-42 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> if Wikipedia vanished what would it mean …

That someone would need to restore some backups, and in the meantime, use mirrors.

Seriously, not that big of a deal. I don't know how many copies of Wikipedia are lying around but considering that archives are free to download, I guess a lot. And if you count text-only versions of the English Wikipedia without history and talk pages, it is literally everywhere as it is a common dataset for natural language processing tasks. It is likely to be the most resilient piece of data of that scale in existence today.

The only difficulty in the worst case scenario would be rebuilding a new central location and restarting the machinery with trusted admins, editors, etc... Any of the tech giants could probably make a Wikipedia replacement in days, with all data restored, but it won't be Wikipedia.

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tempaccount5050 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What you're suggesting is literally impossible. There are plenty of mirrors and random people that download the thing in its entirety. The entire planet would have to be nuked for that to be possible.

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xandrius 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't worry, I personally have an offline backup of the English on my phone.

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__turbobrew__ 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can download the entirety of wikipedia and store it in your own offline immutable backup.

	▲	mrguyorama 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The dump of english wikipedia is 26gb compressed and completely usable with that compressed format plus a small index file. That's small enough to live on most people's phones. It's small enough to be a single BluRay. Maybe Wikipedia should fund some mass printings. What you do not get however is any media. No sounds, images, videos, drawings, examples, 3D artifacts, etc etc etc. This is a huge loss on many many many topics.

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Aperocky 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

All persistent data should have backup.

It's not a high bar.

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lyu07282 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are so many mirrors anyway and trivial to get a local copy? What is much more concerning is government censorship and age verification/digital id laws where what articles you read becomes part of your government record the police sees when they pull you over.

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CaptainNegative 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but at some point a state based cyber attack that just wipes wikipedia off the net is deeply damaging to our modern society’s ability to agree on common facts

Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing and voting campaigns, as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out for a while now?

See, for example,

* Sanger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

* Wales: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gaza_genocide/Archive_22#...

* PirateWires: https://www.piratewires.com/p/how-wikipedia-is-becoming-a-ma...

	▲	wizzwizz4 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> Haven't we hit that point already with bad faith (and potentially government-run) coordinated editing […] campaigns, Yes, this is a real phenomenon. See, for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Wikipedia%E2%80%93...: the examples from 2006 are funny, and the article's subject matter just gets sadder and sadder as the chronology goes on. > and voting campaigns I'm not sure what you mean by this. Wikipedia is not a democracy. > as both Wales and Sanger have been pointing out {{fv}}. Neither of those essays make this point. The closest either gets is Sanger's first thesis, which misunderstands the "support / oppose" mechanism. Ironically, his ninth thesis says to introduce voting, which would create the "voting campaign" vulnerability! These are both really bad takes, which I struggle to believe are made in good faith, and I'm glad Wikipedians are mostly ignoring them. (I have not read the third link you provided, because Substack.)

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streetfighter64 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're using wikipedia to "agree on common facts" I think you might have bigger problems...

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hnfong 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Not the GP, and I don't believe in the existence of "common facts" in general, but Wikipedia is indeed a good place to figure out what other people might agree as common facts...

	▲	streetfighter64 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Well, I'm not sure either what the term "common facts" is supposed to mean, but wikipedia is not a good place to look for what "other people" think, unless if by "other people" you mean a small set of wikipedia powerusers. Just like traditional newspapers are controlled by a small set of editors who decide what's worth publishing, so is wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no...

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CSMastermind 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

https://grokipedia.com/