Date: Fri, 4 Jul 2008 01:50:20 -0700 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: <stevefranks@ieee.org>, "FreeBSD Mailing List" <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: anyone been crazy enough to mirror wikipedia? Message-ID: <BMEDLGAENEKCJFGODFOCCEMJCFAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <539c60b90806301348l4b09cd90n3972b41339276d6f@mail.gmail.com>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@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
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