Quite apart from Wikipedia, archiving the Internet is essential these days. Whole articles seem to get removed with depressing regularity or else someone gets doxxed, often over something relatively trivial and they take down their blog — no matter how excellent their actual writing was.

If I had the time it would be interesting to actually conduct a social experiment and make, for instance, fifty or so uncontroversial corrections to Wikipedia and see how long it takes for them to be deleted.

I am old enough to remember the early days of the Internet and how intoxicating the access to information promised to be. Now it seems as though we are going to be living in the digital equivalent of Fahrenheit 451 with huge amounts of wrong thought simply expunged from the net.

Perhaps it always was the case. Ron Unz writes iabout his awakening in his American Pravda series after he digitized a massive amount of literature from the past 200 years and realized huge amounts of historical knowledge had seemly been forgotten because it didn't fit the contemporary narrative.