Wikipedia:There is a deadline

This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

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WP:TIAD

This page in a nutshell: If the preservation/survivability of the knowledge is at stake, write it earlier before too late.

See also Wikipedia:There is no deadline.

The lost Library of Alexandria. Only one of many destroyed libraries in antiquity. Too late for Wikisource.

Every day, distinct forms of knowledge are lost forever and no copies are available. When a natural disaster hits a region or a war breaks out, a lot of libraries, archives, museums, monuments and other heritage, valuable buildings, incunabula and unique objects are destroyed.

There were plenty of examples of this before Wikipedia's existence. The Libraries of Alexandria and Constantinople, the lost Chinese encyclopedias, churches, monasteries, convents and libraries destroyed during Spanish Civil War^[1], a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 movies^[2], hundreds of libraries and archives bombed and burnt during World War II^[3]^[4], more than 6,000 Tibetans monasteries destroyed during the Cultural Revolution along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts^[5], the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina shelled and burnt to the ground along with thousands of irreplaceable texts^[6], and many more.

Since Wikipedia's inception, the destruction of knowledge has been at least as bad as before. Iraq National Library and other buildings were looted and burnt during the 2003 Iraq invasion^[7], the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or utterly destroyed libraries and archives in several countries, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in the 2010 Haiti earthquake^[8], just as the Chilean heritage during the 2010 Chile earthquake. Recently, the Egyptian Museum was looted during the 2011 Egyptian revolution^[9]. But it does not always take a war or a natural catastrophe to endanger knowledge, as illustrated by the Duchess Anna Amalia Library fire in 2004^[10] or the collapse of the building hosting the Archive of the City of Cologne in 2009^[11].

Symbol of New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, advocating book-burning.
Book burning in Berlin, May 1933.
Burning left-wing books during the early days of the Pinochet military regime.
A cello player in the destroyed National Library, Sarajevo.
The damaged Museum of Contemporary Art in Chile.
Golden toad (Bufo periglenes), now extinct.
Library fire at the Anna Amalia library, 2004.
Collapsed Historical Archive of the City of Cologne, March 2009.

These events usually remove pieces of human knowledge and sometimes entire cultures. Today, a lot of the world's languages are in danger.

Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet, the average life of a web page is only 77 days^[12]. Those websites work in many cases as references. Projects like the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team^[13] save copies of some of them, but many others are lost forever.

Wikipedia and its sister projects can and must save all these forms of knowledge, through creating articles, uploading images to Wikimedia Commons, preserving languages in Wiktionary and transcribing books into Wikisource. Events like Wiki Loves Monuments may help to immortalize monuments around the world before they are damaged or destroyed, but the 2011 edition only covers European countries^[14].

There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.

References

^ El martirio de los libros: una aproximación a la destrucción bibliográfica durante la Guerra Civil Template:Es (Template:WebCite)
^ "$45,000 Fire Drives Families From Homes in Little Ferry", Bergen Evening Record, July 9, 1937, p. 1. Quoted by Richard Koszarski in Fort Lee: The Film Town, Indiana University Press, 2005, pp. 339–341. ISBN 978-0-86196-652-3.
^ It Has Been Done Before! Reconstituting War-Ravaged Libraries (Template:WebCite)
^ Aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, Planned destruction of Warsaw and Polish culture during World War II
^ Tibetan monks: A controlled life (Template:WebCite)
^ Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Template:WebCite)
^ Photos of the Iraq National Library 2003–08
^ Haiti Cultural Recovery Project (Template:Wayback)
^ Breaking: Images of Egyptian Museum Damage -UPDATE 34- King Tut Objects Damaged? (Template:WebCite)
^ Hilfe für Anna Amalia (Template:WebCite)
^ Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians - Spiegel Online International (Template:WebCite)
^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions (Template:WebCite)
^ Archive Team website (Template:WebCite)
^ Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - European website (Template:WebCite)

Bibliography

Lost Memory - Libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century (Template:WebCite)