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People have an amazing ability to fill up any mass storage device you give them, but they don't do it by typing. I doubt many people type 10K worth of text in an average day, which is less than 375M in 100 years, which is less than 1/2000th of what you could fit on a 750G hard-drive, which I can buy for under $200. So that's what, ten cents per lifetime worth of writing under very generous assumptions.
Granted, you would like wikipedia to use a more reliable storage medium than the cheapest hard-drive they can order on-line, but there is still no reason to delete written entries. Storage on backup tape is even cheaper, though it makes access very difficult. You do want to index in such a way that people do not find obscure articles unless they're looking for them. Search engines seem to do a reasonably job at that and keep getting better. As text is edited, you can always keep previous versions. If a falsehood is claimed as a fact, you would want to keep it separate from correct statements, but you don't have to obliterate every record of it.
There are justifications for destroying offensive or sensitive information in some cases, but the justification is not technological.
Gotta love a guy who sticks up for card catalogs. I miss them myself. Oh, no question but that online catalogs are a great development, but there are just some things you cannot do with a search engine that you can do with a collection of real (as opposed to virtual) cards. Browsing, for one. I have yet to see the online catalog that would lend itself to idle browsing and serendipitous discoveries. Sometimes you don't really know what you are looking for until you find it, and how can you possibly turn that up with a search engine that demands to be told what to find before it will look for anything?
Also: I am a frequent patron at the Library of Virginia, which has a very well done computer catalog that is completely Internet accessible and even lets you order books from home in your jammies and have them waiting for you to pick up the next day at the circulation desk. But the computer network seems to go down with depressing regularity, and when it does, poof! No catalog to search. No way to order up a book from the closed stacks, even if you are right there in the library (unless you happen to have fortuitously written down the catalog number of the item you wanted ahead of time). No way even to pay a fine on an overdue book because they cannot find your record to tell you how much you owe.
High-tech can be wonderful -- until it's not there any more, and you're left almost completely paralyzed.
Nicholson Baker gets it. There is no one perfect way to preserve information, and getting rid of one form of information because another is more easily retrievable, as in the case of electronic card catalogs and microfiche of newspaper archives, makes no sense.
Long live curmudgeonhood!
Two decades ago, I moved to the West Coast, so I could work as an EE/CS type without helping the Reagan war machine any more. Since I was no longer working for a defense contractor, I lost my Internet fix, but got my startup company hooked up to Usenet, which in those days sent all our long-winded messages through 1200 baud modems. There was no web yet, just e-mail and distributed discussion groups.
The admins carefully saved all of the technical newsgroups, but no one bothered with the social stuff, the nerdy discussions, the flame wars. But that "irrelevant" material basically contains the origins of net culture as it exists today, Godwin's Law and things like that. I sometimes regret that no one saved it.
And then I remember some of the things my early-20s self used to write, particularly on soc.singles (cringe) and I'm happy that it can't be dredged up, especially since in those days we used our real names.
Much of what is deleted these days is seriously non-notable, including:
This sort of trivia certainly belongs on internet somewhere, but Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopedia. A comprehensive, encyclopedic treatment of everything still doesn't justify logs of every time a cartoon character has mentioned the article topic.
And as you might imagine, quality control in the form of excluding certain content enrages many people.
Other wikis exist with different standards. For any given topic one might like to write about, Wikia.com usually already has a wiki going, and if not they'll create a new one where there is sufficient interest. Other similar providers are listed on
Wikipedia does not have to please everyone. Let Wikipedia can be Wikipedia.
In the midst of setting up this piece Andrew Leonard off-handedly opines: "...who in their right mind would waste their time with a card catalog when a computer was at hand?" So much for Salon's policy of not abusing other members...
When where you born, Mr. Leonard? And if you don't understand the value and use of card catalogs, then don't question the sanity and soundness of mind of those who do understand and indeed still avail themselves of those meticulously developed research tools. It only betrays your ignorance while annoying thoughtful members with different experiences - whom you have so casually insulted and dismissed.
Information is valuable... A good card catalog is information rich. If the information in a card catalog has NOT been migrated to the digital realm (which is most likely the case,) then only a fool would dismiss it before ascertaining its continued usefulness. A card catalog's information is access to a collection. Destroying the catalog is destroying access to the collection...Plain stupidity.
Overly broad dismissals of vintage information technology is a symptom of brash, youthful hubris. Just wait...Your time is coming; One day you'll find that all of your hard earned computing skills obsolete and be stuck in an old folks home with only a membership in Second Life for entertainment.
