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. |
![]() | This page in a nutshell: The preservation or survivability of the world's knowledge is at stake. Contribute it to Wikipedia before it's too late. |
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220627011211im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/64/Ancientlibraryalex.jpg/170px-Ancientlibraryalex.jpg)
Practically 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, 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.
Historical instances[edit]
There are plenty of examples of permanent loss of knowledge before Wikipedia's existence. The following is a non-exhaustive list.[1]
Before 20th century[edit]
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220627011211im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/08/Birmingham_Central_Library_fire_jan1879.jpg/220px-Birmingham_Central_Library_fire_jan1879.jpg)
- The Libraries of Alexandria, House of Wisdom and Constantinople are among many great libraries of the ancient world to have been destroyed. As well, many ancient Chinese encyclopedias are partially or completely lost to history.
- The medieval archives of Gozo were destroyed during the Ottoman invasion of 1551.[2]
- Diego de Landa's burning of the Maya codices in 1562. Only four are known to have survived. Most knowledge of Maya history is thus lost.
- The Beeldenstorm that spread through the Low countries in 1566 in which many statues and religious artifacts of the Catholic Church were destroyed by iconoclasts.
- A fire destroyed more than 500 paintings located in Royal Alcázar of Madrid on Christmas Eve 1734. Other works, such as Las Meninas by Velázquez, were saved.
- The 1836 U.S. Patent Office fire irretrievably destroyed most of the U.S. patent documents collected up to that time.
- A fire in the Birmingham Central Library in 1879 caused extensive damage with only 1,000 volumes saved from a stock of 50,000.[3]
20th century[edit]
- Churches, monasteries, convents and libraries were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.[4]
- Most of the 1890 United States Census materials were destroyed in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in Washington, D.C. in 1921.[5]
- A storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Film Corporation's pre-1935 movies.[6] Furthermore, the vast majority of the silent films produced in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are considered lost. According to a September 2013 report published by the United States Library of Congress, some 70 per cent of American silent feature films fall into this category.[7]
- Hundreds of libraries and archives were destroyed and their contents lost during World War II.[1][8][9]
- A fire in the National Library of Peru destroyed highly valued historical works in 1943.[10]
- More than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts.[11]
- The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was shelled and burnt to the ground, along with thousands of irreplaceable texts, in the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992 during the Bosnian War.[12]
- Some of the original Apollo 11 moon landing tapes in high quality have been recorded over and lost.[13] But all the data was copied as archived in several locations at the time.[14]
- In June 1981, during the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Jaffna Public Library was burnt by Sinhalese Buddhist mobs, destroying over 97,000 rare books and manuscripts in the process.[15]
- During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, a fire was started in the Central University Library of Bucharest and over 500,000 books, along with 3,700 manuscripts, were burnt.[16]
Modern examples[edit]
Unfortunately, the destruction of knowledge has not ceased with Wikipedia's inception in 2001. Here are a few examples.
2000s[edit]
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220627011211im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Anna_amalia_bibliothek_weimar_brandschaden_03092004_nachmittag.jpg/220px-Anna_amalia_bibliothek_weimar_brandschaden_03092004_nachmittag.jpg)
- In 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive and other buildings were looted and burnt during the U.S. invasion.[17]
- In 2004, part of the collection at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Germany was lost to a fire, less than two months before the collection was to be moved.[18]
- The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or destroyed libraries and archives in several countries.
- In 2009, the Historical Archive building of the City of Cologne collapsed.[19]
- On October 26, 2009, GeoCities was shut down, removing from public view 38 million pages built by users over 15 years.[20] It was only partially preserved by Archive Team.
2010s[edit]
- In 2010, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in an earthquake.[21] Little over a month later, Chile's heritage suffered similar destruction in its own earthquake.
- The Egyptian Museum was looted during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.[22]
- In December 2011, a fire destroyed all but 30,000 of the 200,000 books in the historic Egyptian Scientific Institute.[23][24]
- In May 2012, shrines forming part of the Timbuktu World Heritage Site were destroyed by the Islamist group Ansar Dine.[25][26]
- Some buildings and churches were damaged in the 2012 Northern Italy earthquakes.
- In June 2012, many documents were burned during a fire at the secretarial building of Mumbai.[27][28]
- Syrian heritage has been damaged, destroyed and looted during the Syrian Civil War.[29]
- On October 15, 2013, the Bohol earthquake destroyed and damaged several iconic sites.[30]
- On December 25, 2013, the Santuario da Virxe da Barca was destroyed by a fire resulting from lightning.[31]
- The Al Sa’eh Library in Tripoli, Lebanon, with 80,000 books and manuscripts, was burnt down in January 2014.[32]
- Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) damaged Mosul Museum artifacts, Mosul Public Library books and other cultural heritage sites like the ancient temples of Baalshamin and Bel.[33]
- The April 25, 2015, Nepal earthquake damaged and destroyed centuries-old buildings in the UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley, including some at Kathmandu Durbar Square.[34]
- On April 26, 2016, National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi and its entire collection were destroyed by fire.[35]
- A museum dedicated to Nicola Filotesio stood in the town of his birth until it was destroyed in the August 2016 Central Italy earthquake.[36]
- A fire burned down the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018, destroying more than 90 percent of its collection of more than 20 million objects.[37][38] Many holdings, such as records of extinct languages, were one-of-a-kind and irreplaceably lost.[39]
- In March 2019, Myspace announced that it had lost all music uploaded between 2003 and 2015.[40]
2020s[edit]
- In January 2020, a fire damaged or destroyed much of the collection of New York City's Museum of Chinese in America. Around 35,000 of the 85,000 items had been digitized and backed up before the fire.[41]
- In April 2021, the University of Cape Town Jagger Library was damaged by a wildfire, threatening its collection of African antiquities.[42]
- On July 29, 2021, the Cinemateca Brasileira was hit by a fire,[43] the fifth in its history.[44]
- Many Ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, the Kuindzhi Art Museum, and the Club 8-bit computer museum were destroyed by bombardment, while cultural centers like the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and the Korolenko Chernihiv Regional Universal Scientific Library were damaged.
Future threats[edit]
![](http://webcf.waybackmachine.org/web/20220627011211im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6f/Geolocated_images_in_Wikimedia_Commons_2016-04-16.png/220px-Geolocated_images_in_Wikimedia_Commons_2016-04-16.png)
Today, many of the world's languages are endangered or nearly extinct.[46][47] In some cases where parents have stopped teaching an endangered language to their children, the language is understood by only a few elderly speakers. The Rosetta 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.[48]
Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.[49] Those websites work in many cases as references. Projects like the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team[50] save copies of some of them, but many others are lost forever. This issue may affect Wikimedia projects too, and mirrors 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 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.[51]
There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.
Gallery[edit]
Royal Alcazar of Madrid was consumed by fire in 1734. More than 500 paintings were lost.
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
Church of Saint Paul in Mirabello, Ferrara
The town hall of Sant'Agostino
Mural painting in the Purila Manor, Estonia, almost erased by age
Fallen statue of zoologist Louis Agassiz after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake
The Great Mosque of Aleppo was damaged in fighting in 2013
Demolition of the Church of St. Lambertus, Immerath (2018) to make room for a surface mine
Fire at the National Museum of Brazil
See also[edit]
Articles[edit]
- Art destruction
- Digital dark age
- Digital preservation
- Book burning and List of book burning incidents
- Impermanence
- List of destroyed libraries
- List of destroyed heritage
- Lost work, Lost artworks and List of lost films
- Rosetta Stone
Documentaries[edit]
- Biblioteca en guerra (2009, Blanca Calvo & Ramón Salaberria)
- Cicatrices de Sarajevo (2012, Miguel Ángel Viñas)
- Digital Amnesia (2014, Bregtje van der Haak)
- Digital dark age: help, we're disappearing! (2004, Jörg Daniel Hissen & Peter Moers)
- Internet Archive (2012, Jonathan Minard)
- Las cajas españolas (2004, Alberto Porlan)
- Lost Forever (2011, Paul Mariano & Kurt Norton)
- Metrópolis refundada (2010, Evangelina Loguercio)
- Rescatando sombras. Cine, muerte y memoria (2012, Franco Lorenzana)
- The Destruction of Memory (2016, Tim Slade)
- The End of Memory? (2015, Vincent Amouroux)
- The House of History (1996, Quadir Taheri)
Essays[edit]
- User:Emijrp/All Human Knowledge (userbox {{User preserve all human knowledge}})
- Wikipedia:There is no deadline
- Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress
- Wikipedia:Build content to endure
Projects[edit]
- Internet Archive
- Long Now Foundation and Rosetta Project
- Memory of Mankind
- meta:Wikipedia to the Moon
- Arch Mission Foundation
References[edit]
- ^ a b Lost Memory — Libraries and Archives Destroyed in the Twentieth Century (Archived August 12, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Grima, Noel (23 May 2015). "Notarial Archives discovery: Documents from Gozo dating to 1431 saved from the bin". The Malta Independent. Archived from the original on 11 August 2015.
- ^ Notes on the history of Birmingham Public Libraries (1861-1961), Birmingham, 1962
- ^ (in Spanish) El martirio de los libros: una aproximación a la destrucción bibliográfica durante la Guerra Civil (Archived September 27, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ US Census Bureau, Census History Staff. "Availability of 1890 Census - History - U.S. Census Bureau". Census.gov. Retrieved 2017-10-24.
- ^ "$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.
- ^ "Library Reports on America's Endangered Silent-Film Heritage". News from the Library of Congress (Press release). Library of Congress. December 4, 2013. ISSN 0731-3527. Retrieved March 7, 2014.
- ^ It Has Been Done Before! Reconstituting War-Ravaged Libraries (Archived September 27, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, Planned destruction of Warsaw and Polish culture during World War II
- ^ Carlos Aguirre: El incendio de la Biblioteca Nacional del Perú de 1943 on YouTube
- ^ Tibetan monks: A controlled life (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Erasing the Past: The Destruction of Libraries and Archives in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Archived August 30, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Original moon walk footage erased
- ^ Not-Unsolved Mysteries: The “Lost” Apollo 11 Tapes
- ^ "Remembering The Jaffna Public Library Destroyed By Sinhalese Extremists". Swarajya. June 1, 2016.
- ^ The Central University Library of Bucharest, official site: "the History".
- ^ "Photos of the Iraq National Library 2003–08". Archived from the original on 2010-04-27. Retrieved 2012-07-05.
- ^ (in German) Hilfe für Anna Amalia (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Archive Collapse Disaster for Historians - Spiegel Online International (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Shechmeister, Matthew (2009-11-03). "Ghost Pages: A Wired.com Farewell to GeoCities". Wired.com. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
- ^ Haiti Cultural Recovery Project (Archive index at the Wayback Machine)
- ^ Breaking: Images of Egyptian Museum Damage -UPDATE 34- King Tut Objects Damaged? (Archived September 22, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Amid army crackdown, Egypt’s richest library set on fire (Archived December 17, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Un incendio durante los disturbios de El Cairo destruye el original de la 'Descripción de Egipto' encargada por Napoleón (Archived December 19, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Timbuktu's Sidi Yahia mosque 'attacked by Mali militants' (Archived July 6, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Islamists vow to smash every mausoleum in Timbuktu (Archived July 6, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Towering inferno engulfs Mumbai’s seat of power (Archived July 6, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Mumbai government building engulfed in fire (Archived July 6, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Damage to the soul: Syria's cultural heritage in conflict (Archived August 12, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ Pia Ranada (October 15, 2013). "Heartbreaking: 10 iconic churches in Bohol, Cebu damaged". Rappler. Retrieved October 15, 2013.
- ^ "Un rayo destruye un emblemático santuario en Muxía". El Mundo. 2013-12-25. Archived from the original on 2013-12-25. Retrieved 2013-12-25.
- ^ "Lebanon Loses 78000 Books To Terrorism: Tripoli's "Al Sa'eh" Library Burned". Archived from the original on 2014-01-05.
- ^ "ISIS thugs take a hammer to civilisation: Priceless 3,000-year-old artworks smashed to pieces in minutes as militants destroy Mosul museum". Daily Mail. Retrieved 26 February 2015.
- ^ "Nepal landmarks flattened by the quake". Retrieved April 25, 2015.
- ^ Vidhi Doshi (2016-04-26). "Fire guts Delhi's natural history museum". The Guardian. Retrieved 2016-04-26.
- ^ La Repubblica, Terremoto nel centro Italia, i danni al patrimonio artistico
- ^ "Brazil's 200-year-old national museum hit by huge fire". 2018-09-03. Retrieved 2018-09-03.
- ^ "Los meteoritos sobreviven al incendio que ha devastado siglos de historia en Río de Janeiro".
- ^ McCulloch, Gretchen. "Linguistics Division". All Things Linguistic. Retrieved 23 April 2020.
- ^ Tiffany, Kaitlyn (March 18, 2019). "Myspace, which still exists, accidentally deleted 12 years' worth of music". Vox. Retrieved 19 June 2019.
- ^ Katz, Brigit. "Fire at Museum of Chinese in America Caused Less Damage Than Initially Feared". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved 2020-02-01.
- ^ Wroughton, Lesley. "South Africa wildfire that burned University of Cape Town, library of African antiquities is under control". Washington Post. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
- ^ "Incêndio atinge unidade da Cinemateca Brasileira na Zona Oeste de SP" (in Brazilian Portuguese). 2021-07-29. Retrieved 2021-07-29.
- ^ "História da TV e do cinema queima junto com o quinto incêndio da Cinemateca" (in Brazilian Portuguese). 2021-07-29. Retrieved 2021-07-29.
- ^ The Geograph Britain and Ireland project (Archived July 6, 2012, at WebCite)
- ^ "The Endangered Languages Project". EndangeredLanguages.com. Retrieved 2019-01-16.
- ^ "Endangered Languages - Ethnologue". Ethnologue.com. Retrieved 2019-01-16.
- ^ The Rosetta Project items from The Long Now Foundation
- ^ Internet Archive Frequently Asked Questions (Archived October 3, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Archive Team website (Archived October 3, 2011, at WebCite)
- ^ Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 - European website (Archived October 2, 2011, at WebCite)
Further reading[edit]
- Báez, Fernando (2004). Historia universal de la destrucción de libros. De las tablillas sumerias a la Guerra de Irak. ISBN 9788423335961
- UNESCO (1996). Lost Memory - Libraries and archives destroyed in the twentieth century (Archived August 12, 2012, at WebCite)
- Vines, Timothy et al. (2013). The availability of research data declines rapidly with article age. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2013.11.014
External links[edit]
- Translations for this essay (permalink to original version) are more than welcome: German (webcite), French (webcite), Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Italian, Nederlands, Romanian, Swedish,
- Things get lost. Capture them (Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 blog post by Elke)
- Photos of destroyed heritage (Wiki Loves Monuments 2013 blog post) (Ukrainian version)
- Joel Aldor wants to preserve historic Filipino architecture one photo at a time (Wikimedia Blog, 2014)
- 2015 Earthquake in Nepal: A Wake-up Call for Monument Documentation (Wiki Loves Monuments blog post, 2018)
- Archive Corps, A Volunteer Collective To Help Quickly Save Physical Archives Before They Are Lost (see also Archive Team)
- WikiTeam – Volunteers group to preserve wikis
- Wikimedia projects edits counter – Total edits in Wikimedia projects (near real time)