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by flir 488 days ago
At least we'll get a good example for the Chesterton's Fence wiki page.
2 comments

Until the Heritage Foundation succeeds in dismantling Wikipedia.
That makes me wonder what the Wikimedia Foundation's disaster recovery plan looks like.

The crucial bit of infrastructure (and the most vulnerable point right now) might be the domain name.

FWIW they have instructions for downloading the whole thing, which mention that it is also downloadable from BitTorrent. So I think it is functionally impossible to delete Wikipedia.

I’d be more worried about propaganda being inserted.

I'm not worried about the data, and even losing the servers would be a hiccup. But whatever site is at www.wikipedia.org is, in the minds of the general public, Wikipedia.

Domain names have been seized in the past.

I imagine most traffic to Wikipedia is through search, so I imagine such a fate is in the hands of search engines. If a community-driven alternative appeared, we'd have to rely on Google indexing this alternative and ranking it higher than the usurped domain.
Search is also vulnerable.

It's been called "wokepedia" (not to be confused with Wookieepedia, the star wars wiki) by Musk and others, telling people not to donate.

And also people have been denouncing Google's search results as biased, as being "woke".

I'm still not sure what any specific user of the word "woke" means, beyond the Ami/UK right using it as an insult, but I can't tell if it's generic or specific, critiquing something or just telling supporters when to boo and jeer. Does the Ami/UK left still use it to mean "being aware of systemic prejudice", or have they also shifted? I didn't notice at the time when "meme" stopped meaning shared online quiz.

> I’d be more worried about propaganda being inserted.

FWIW, it would be far from the first time that’s happened (including for sensitive US issues).

It is loaded with propaganda right now.
Is it really a Chesterton's Fence if it's covered in signs saying "do not remove" with simple explanations in large, friendly letters?
Not if you stop understanding or believing the signs.

Very well done doc, though overly concerned, on how keep people in the future away from nuclear waste: Into Eternity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayLxB9fV2y4