It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not beenthoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.
Practically every day, distinct forms ofknowledge are lost forever and no copies are available. When anatural disaster hits a region or awar breaks out,libraries,archives,museums,monuments and other artifacts of heritage, valuable buildings,incunabula and unique objects are destroyed or face the threat of destruction. These events usually remove pieces of human knowledge and sometimes entire cultures.
A fire destroyed more than 500 paintings located inRoyal Alcázar of Madrid on Christmas Eve 1734. Other works, such asLas Meninas by Velázquez, were saved.
The1836 U.S. Patent Office fire irretrievably destroyed most of the U.S. patent documents collected up to that time.
A fire in theBirmingham Central Library in 1879 caused extensive damage with only 1,000 volumes saved from a stock of 50,000.[3]
Most of the1890 United States Census materials were destroyed in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. in 1921.[5]
Astorage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives ofFox Film Corporation's pre-1935 movies.[6] Furthermore, the vast majority of thesilent films produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are consideredlost. According to a September 2013 report published by the United StatesLibrary of Congress, some 70 per cent of American silent feature films fall into this category.[7]
Some of the original Apollo 11Moon landing tapes in high quality have been recorded over and lost.[13] However, all the data was copied as archived in several locations at the time.[14]
In 2004, part of the collection at theDuchess Anna Amalia Library in Germany was lost to a fire, less than two months before the collection was to be moved.[18]
On October 17, 2004, a fire in theParque Central Complex of Caracas, Venezuela, destroyed the tower'splanoteca, an archive containing the entire history of the country's public building plans spanning two centuries, including aqueduct and sewer systems.[19]
On October 26, 2009,GeoCities was shut down, removing from public view 38 million pages built by users over 15 years.[21] It was only partially preserved byArchive Team.
In 2010, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in anearthquake.[22] Little over a month later, Chile's heritage suffered similar destruction inits own earthquake.
In Venezuela, starting in 2010s, due to the economic decline of the newspapers, the transition to the Internet, and growing restrictions on the press, caused the loss of significant parts of media digital archives.[35]
On May 23, 2014, TheGlasgow School of Art, known as 'The Mac' was badly damaged in a fire that destroyed theMackintosh library, a second fire in 2018 finished the job destroying much of the rest of the building and theO2 ABC arena, and nightclub next door.[36][37]
A fire burned down theNational Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018, destroying more than 90 percent of its collection of more than 20million objects.[41][42] Many holdings, such as records ofextinct languages, were one-of-a-kind and irreplaceably lost.[43]
In March 2019,Myspace announced that it had lost all music uploaded between 2003 and 2015.[44]
By the late 2010s, several film archives in Venezuela started being damaged and lost due to neglect.[45]
In January 2020, a fire damaged or destroyed much of the collection of New York City'sMuseum of Chinese in America. Around 35,000 of the 85,000 items had been digitized and backed up before the fire.[46]
In April 2021, the University of Cape TownJagger Library was damaged by a wildfire, threatening its collection of African antiquities.[47]
On 2023–24, in the context of theIsrael–Hamas war, over 100 cultural heritage landmarks have been destroyed or damaged by Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip. This includes archives, libraries, and museums, notably the complete destruction of theCentral Archives of Gaza City.[50]
The current coverage ofWikimedia Commons is imbalanced (5.2M geolocated images in the map). We must preserve the current world to the future generations. Imagine a project likeGeograph Britain and Ireland[52] but globally.
Today, many of the world'slanguages areendangered or nearlyextinct.[53][54] In some cases where parents have stopped teaching an endangered language to their children, the language is understood byonly a few elderly speakers. TheRosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of material on the nearly 7,000 known human languages.[55]
Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on theInternet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.[56] Those websites work in many cases asreferences. Projects like theInternet Archive orWebCitation and volunteer groups likeArchive Team[57] save copies of some of them, but many othersare lost forever. This issue may affect Wikimedia projects too, andmirrors are needed to assure long-term preservation of the data.
Wikipedia and its sister projects can—and must—save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images and recordings toWikimedia Commons, preserving languages inWiktionary and transcribing books intoWikisource. Events likeWiki Loves Monuments may help to immortalize monuments around the world before they are damaged or destroyed.[58]
Thereis a deadline. This is a battle against time.
^Yonekura, Kaoru (December 2, 2020)."Periódicos sin archivos, país sin memoria" [Newspapers without archives, country without memory].Cinco8 (in Spanish). RetrievedJune 9, 2023.
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