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Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive
(www.theverge.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2025
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Technology
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Some solution is better than no solution. I don't mind having a 'fossil' version for a pinch. We got along okay with hardcovered encyclopedias pre-internet and this is not that different except it still being reliant on electricity. (I have different, more valuable books on hand if we ever wind up THAT fucked.)
My point is that the alternative isn't "no solution", it's "the much better database dump from Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation or wherever, the one that a new Wikipedia instance actually would be spun up from, not the one that you downloaded months ago and stashed in your closet."
The fact that random people on the Internet have old copies of an incomplete, static copy of Wikipedia doesn't really help anything. The real work that would go into bringing back Wikipedia would be creating the new hosting infrastructure capable of handling it, not trying to scrounge up a database to put on it.
Isn't there a way to sync the copy to the current version?
Sure, but are any of these "don't worry guys I torrented a database dump, it's safe now" folks going to go to the trouble of actually doing that? They're not even downloading a full backup, just the current version.
You need to devote a lot of bandwidth to keeping continuously up to date with Wikipedia. There's only a few archives out there that are likely doing that, and of course Wikimedia Foundation and its international chapters themselves. Those are the ones who will provide the data needed to restart Wikipedia, if it actually comes to that.
I don't know but if there's a way to get from WP only the history from a moment onwards, then it shouldn't be that hard to update it.