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.
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
There are plenty of examples of permanent loss of knowledge before Wikipedia's existence. The following is a non-exhaustive list.[1]
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]
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]
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 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]
On 17 October 2004, a fire in the
Parque Central Complex of Caracas, Venezuela, destroyed the tower's planoteca, 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 by
Archive Team.
2010s
In 2010, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in an
earthquake.[22] Little over a month later, Chile's heritage suffered similar destruction in
its 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 the 23rd of May 2014 The
Glasgow School of Art, known as 'The Mac' was badly damaged in a fire that destroyed the
Mackintosh library, a second fire in 2018 finished the job destroying much of the rest of the building and the
O2 ABC arena, and nightclub next door.[36][37]
A fire burned down the
National 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 of
extinct 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]
2020s
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.[46]
In April 2021, the University of Cape Town
Jagger Library was damaged by a wildfire, threatening its collection of African antiquities.[47]
On 2023-24, in the context of the
Israel–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 the
Central Archives of Gaza City.[50]
Future threats
Today, many of the world's
languages are
endangered or nearly
extinct.[52][53] 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.[54]
Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the
Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days.[55] Those websites work in many cases as
references. Projects like the
Internet Archive or
WebCitation and volunteer groups like
Archive Team[56] 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.[57]
There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.
^Yonekura, Kaoru (2 December 2020).
"Periódicos sin archivos, país sin memoria" [Newspapers without archives, country without memory]. Cinco8 (in Spanish). Retrieved 2023-06-09.