After they kill Wikipedia history will be AI hallucinations.

killing all of wikipedia is gunna be almost impossible, theres probably millions of backups around the world. here's a few links to download it, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents, https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- To add to that, and to make it easier for some, you can use Kiwix!
  
  but can it run on an ipod 🧐
  (actually a pretty cool video btw)
- Not only that, but MediaWiki is FOSS, and all existing content on all Wikimedia Foundation (except for a relative few kept on fair use grounds) is at most as restrictive as CC BY-SA 4.0. So you'd have whatever exists on Wikipedia currently (plus Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikispecies, etc., keeping in mind too that there are many Wikipedias besides English) plus the software that interacts with that data, other countries which haven't fully descended into fascism, the members of the Wikimedia Foundation, a bunch of pissed-off editors, and a pissed-off public... I think a new, substantially similar non-profit would crop up in the UK etc., and very few things would have to change about the content that's on the platform (where the UK has more restrictive speech laws).
- I did already, tried the XOWA client to run a local copy on my PC. Wasn't as easy as I hoped but it worked.
  Planning to get a couple of USBs stashed away with full copies of Wikipedia and the reader app for knowledge security. You can fit the whole thing with a working installation onto a 128GB USB or less. My install dir was about 69GB total.
  
  additionally not everyone considers to backup the actual software used to compress/decompress the data. that isn’t permanent either and could disappear as well, same as wikipedia rendering such backups useless.
  granted, it’s like, 10000x less likely than the already unlikely event of wikipedia being raptured. but the datahoarder mindset is better safe than sorry…
  
  USB sticks will lose the data after a couple of years of not being powered

https://xkcd.com/285/

There's more to history than Wikipedia. Like physical books
- I didn't even think of that 🤦
  I've been online for too long
  
  Back in my day you had to buy Wikipedia. It came in like 20 massive volumes that ate up a shelf or two.
  Thinking about it… I wonder what my parents did with our copies…
- And historians
  
  The US based ones will be silenced because the algo will ignore them.
- Not all physical books are accessible, eg the log books of Christopher Columbus. DOGE is defunding libraries and Dept of Ed. Academics are fleeing. This collapse of knowledge is bad.

You can dowload wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
- here's the torrent: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_Wikipedia
  like 20gb when packed, ~90 when unpacked
  Also archive.org, idk which one to seed that personally fits my limited storage space, so i'll just link the category, https://archive.org/details/wikimediadownloads
  there's also this, but idk about it, just listing options🤷‍♀️ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
  *just in case someone thinks its suspicious: they were all linked directly from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download under the "Where do I get the dumps?" section
- Thank you so much for this. I have been trying to offline Wikipedia for months but the torrent links on the kiwix site are broken or something. They stall out for me in the first 10m everytime. The download from your link is working perfectly.
  
  It's not going to be much use to you if you don't have a parser, though there are html dumps somewhere iirc.

You can't kill Wikipedia. MediaWiki is free software. If hosting in the US proves to be too hostile, the foundation can either pack up and host elsewhere, and even if they don't, anyone else can easily host their own Wikipedia as well.
- I'm not here to be a doomer but net neutrality was murdered.
  
  You can download Wikipedia to your computer. It’s big but it’s not an unreasonable download size. Many people have backed it up already!
  It’s very unlikely to disappear without someone having a copy.

If you think Wikipedia is the only place that stores historical knowledge, please, start thinking about how much time you're spending online.
- It is a modern library of Alexandria, free to all globally and community built. It's genuinely an amazing surviving piece of the old internet. No one is saying it's the only place, but it is vitally important and a huge deal if it goes away. Shame on you for downplaying that.
  
  Unfortunately it’s not exactly community built, but more like a class of chronically online editors control it and prevent heterodox views and ideas from being added entirely.
  
  I'm not trying to downplay it, but to say it's the be all and end all of all historical knowledge is factually incorrect and myopic.

Better fucking not. Wikipedia is my life bruh.

Wouldn't it make sense to just host the website from another country, outside of US jurisdiction?

They don’t need or want to kill Wikipedia. They just need to heavily edit it. Kind of a dream come true for those pushing a narrative.
- In my mind that would be killing it.
  
  It’s already happened, and is still happening. So is it dead? Or maybe it’s been a half-aware zombie all along.

books exist
- Not for long

Who are "they"?
- Tech bros like musk who capture companies to gut them.
  
  But Wikipedia isn't a company. It's a non-profit foundation.

I mean they can try to censor it but I really don't see why the wikimedia foundation wouldn't just move shop to a different country, or a different group just starts running a mirror of it. Like it might be down for a while, at which time we would have to use mirrors, but I can't see any future where its just gone forever.

There are a lot of citations to things like Britannica from 1911 that is archived and public domain.

Download the Downloader / Viewer at https://kiwix.org/.
Get your own backed up copy and keep it on a thumb drive.

Start downloading comrades

I mean every historical source is full of one sided propaganda.
Have you ever heard the phrase "history is written by winners"?
What have keep history alive is not Wikipedia. Is the fact that multiple people from multiple POV write things down and we can find and read multiple sources.
Don't get me wrong, Wikipedia is great, but it's not what keeps history more or less accurate. Take into account that Wikipedia is a sum up of other sources. In order to write to Wikipedia you must quote a primary source.
And AI really doesn't have much to do with anything here. Bad sources have existed forever, since Herodotus.
- Wikipedia citing sources is exactly what keeps it accurate. Conflicting primary sources are both considered, and the discrepancies discussed.

Wait surely there's someone using ai to edit wiki articles? Is that a thing?
- Yes, I think that's the scenario most commenters are missing; Wikipedia could evolve into something it's not. Then what good are backups as they won't capture the decades/centuries to come.

First of all, they aren't going to kill Wikipedia.
Second, Wikipedia isn't even close to being the only place to get your history. There's this neat little place called a fucking library. You can go there for free.
- they're trying to kill PBS. NPR.
  Anything to prevent an informed public.

Does it matter? History only matters if actions in the now are justified by interpretations of the past.
Thanks to the internet, we have instant access to the experience of billions of people. All human experience is already there and doesn't have to be approximated by history.
- That's a very uneducated take, and shows that you don't understand how access to information can be changed, and modeled to elicit certain outcomes.
  Unbiased, well cited repositories of information are essential.
  
  I agree, for the way our societies are structured.
  My point is that we could organize us in a way that history could provide additional depth but that the essential decisions could be made as well without the knowlege of history.
- And yet, despite having instant access to the Internet you write this utter bullshit. "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
  
  The past doesn't tell you what to do, especially not when your recordings of history are wrong. If you cannot trust your history, how are you going to make decisions?
- The problem is:
  So many of those voices are idiots.
  So if you can get enough idiots to say something, it kind of becomes the truth.
  
  So we need software that enhances the voices of those who we want to hear.