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This week, two prominent Republicans, Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky) and Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina), both of whom play influential roles in the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, announced plans to probe into everybody’s favorite digital encyclopedia. In a letter that Comer and Mace sent to the Wikimedia Foundation (which helps run the site), they asked for internal documents that might show evidence of bad actors who had commandeered Wikipedia for their own ends. The letter, dated Aug. 27th, states that the committee is
investigating the efforts of foreign operations and individuals at academic institutions subsidized by U.S. taxpayer dollars to influence U.S. public opinion. We seek your assistance in obtaining documents and communications regarding individuals (or specific accounts) serving as Wikipedia volunteer editors who violated Wikipedia platform policies as well as your own efforts to thwart intentional, organized efforts to inject bias into important and sensitive topics.
right, exactly what all data backup engineers say. why bother, its out of date!
/s
A backup is useless if it can’t be made “live” again. If you talk to an actual backup engineer they’ll tell you that ensuring a backup is kept is only half the battle, you can’t be confident of that backup until you try restoring it to ensure it can actually come back online.
If I made a backup of the Fediverse’s data and stored that safely away, but the Fediverse itself was no longer capable of being posted to, would I have “protected” the Fediverse? Not really.
A backup isn’t until it’s been proven it can be restored.
Schrödingers backup
depends on your context. and your context sucks.
could wikipedia be rebuilt with one of those backups? yes, it fucking can. it would be a bitch, but the data is there… the important bits are there.
the fediverse is a series of servers, so your attempt at some kind of analog falls pretty fucking flat.
my instance has a backup of almost all the kbin.social data for example… could it be restored if i happen to get the domain? yes, i absolutely could take my data and rebuild it. would it be perfect? no. but its far better than tossing my hands up in there air like yourself and saying “nope, youre fucked”… or as you put it ‘useless’
Sure, Wikipedia could be rebuilt from one of those backups. But it won’t be. If it needs to be rebuilt it’ll be built from the latest database image, not some random months-old dump that someone downloaded and stashed on their home computer.
The point I’m trying to make here is that downloading a backup copy is not “doing something.” One shouldn’t breathe a sigh of relief and rest easy in the knowledge that Wikipedia is “protected” because you’ve done that. That action is an irrelevant microscopic speck compared to what is actually needed to be done to protect Wikipedia.
unless you 100% know the future of humanity you dont get to say what will be valuable.
ive downloaded copies of dr who that only exist because some random guy in some random australian back woods made a backup of the video. it wasnt the studio that had that backup, it was a rando.
‘dont do that because it might not be useful’ is kind of callous considering the whole point of wikipedia is as a storage for humanities knowledge base specifically not knowing what the future holds. why the fuck do you think they made it so portable?
i feel kind of bad for you, and i have to assume youre young as you lack context into the big picture
I happen to 100% know that there are better backups of Wikipedia than the one that a random person out on the Internet has downloaded onto their hard drive. Internet Archive, for example, maintains an up-to-date archive. So even if Wikipedia just abruptly evaporated one day that will be a better source to go to.
But even if Trump really really hates Wikipedia, he’s not in a position to just make it evaporate abruptly. The Wikimedia Foundation would see any such shutdown coming and would secure its own backups. There are a lot of international chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation, they could take updates right to the moment that the jack-booted thugs pull the power cords from the servers.
You assume wrong. I expect my Wikipedia account is older than many of the commenters here.
Thanks for feeling bad for me though, I guess.
you can never have too many backups of humanities knowledge. i guess youre just overflowing with optimism and prescience. we all know thats never bit anyone in the asshole.
Sure, one can have too many backups. When those backups are taking up space that other more at-risk or more useful data could be taking, then that’s a bad thing. When those backups are not actually useful, then the making of them was a waste of time and effort. When making those backups makes people think “ah, there, I’ve solved it” and then they do nothing more, that’s bad.
It’s like all those people switching over to paper straws instead of plastic and thinking that made a lick of difference to ocean microplastics, or whatever. I’m all for taking action to try to help with problems, I’m just saying that it’s best to take actions that actually help with stuff.
Maybe instead of buying a portable hard drive to stick that backup onto, donate the money to one of those international chapters I mentioned.
ahh the next hilarious stretch.
yes storage is soo expensive nowadays all those people sacrificing their precious storage! most peoples laptops have hundreds of GBs of storage they will never actually utilize… and thats just on crappy retail boxes.
youre clearly struggling to find some reason why people shouldnt be doing this, but i have yet to hear a single reason thats actually detrimental to anyone but those whose egos are tied the to contributor metadata that might get lost.
again, not a single reason this data shouldnt be replicated.
Yeah, they’re after the Internet Archive too.
They were one example. As I said,
In my next paragraph I mentioned the international chapters of Wikimedia Foundation, they’re another example.
Trump can’t erase Wikipedia. He can disrupt the smooth functioning of Wikipedia, though, which is the thing I was pointing out is a bigger concern. That’s not something that can be solved by randomly scattering yet more out-of-date database dumps in peoples’ closets. That’s something that the Wikimedia Foundation itself is best positioned to work on, they’re best positioned to ensure there are fail-over options to keep en.wikipedia.org running in the event that the American government goes full authoritarian on them.