An article in the brand-new issue of 'The New Yorker', under "Annals of Technology", titled "The Cobweb: Can the Internet be Archived?" (Jan 26, 2015 edition, pp.34-41) via Hackers.
quote
The footnote, a landmark in the history of civilization, took centuries to invent and to spread. It has taken mere years nearly to destroy. A footnote used to say, "Here is how I know this and where I found it." A footnote that's a link says, "Here is what I used to know and where I once found it, but chances are it's not there anymore." It doesn't matter whether footnotes are your stock-in-trade. Everybody's in a pinch. Citing a Web page as the source for something you know using a URL as evidence is ubiquitous. Many people find themselves doing it three or four times before breakfast and five times more before lunch. What happens when your evidence vanishes by dinner time?
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While many wonder how we can make a digital medium that has the staying power of, say, stone tablets, I have asked and answered a more difficult question, how to keep my original wiki alive past my own lifetime?
Simply preserving the wiki’s database isn’t sufficient as this would be a dead copy. The analogy would be that of preserving a bird species by shooting and mounting the last mating couple to collect dust in some museum.
My answer is to pour the content into a new wiki implementation where individuals freely copy the pages they find useful and then share them along with their own writing to be similarly copied as long as there are readers who care.
I give this content some integrity beyond pure gossip by appending a history to each page including links to source sites that can be consulted by the curious for as long as those sites last.
My inspiration here is life itself where information structures are held in place over geologic time by a steady flow of energy and proven utility in proliferation.