Recently I was wandering if there is someone or some group preserving , collecting , organizing and publishing all the knowledge of mankind ever created throughout its existence so that if ever mankind faces the 6th mass extinction we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can have a kick start to our new post apocalyptic civilization .
Wikipedia is a great start. You can download its entirety, roughly 100gb. Most of the basic and advanced human knowledge.
Check out kiwix to get it offline
Seconded Wikipedia. The amount of knowledge that can be gleaned in mere minutes from Wikipedia is insane. It contains enough information to do most stuff, aside from blatantly illegal things.
Luckily it isnt that easy to burn down every server as burning carpets in south america or books in other places
Wikipedia is basically useless without the sources, though. It’s just a TL;DR summary of things.
Wikipedia is absolutely not useless without the sources. I don’t even know what to say, that statement is so deranged.
WP as it is is of course not useless. But don’t confuse it with a real library. Then, imagine in the apocalyptical worst case, having archived only that summary of humankind’s knowledge. There’s a vast amount of detail that WP is just not the right place for.
Well, sure, of course it leaves a lot of material out. But you’d start with Wikipedia surely, then move onto the source material. If Wikipedia leaves out a lot of material, any one of its sources leaves out a lot more.
Then you download the source material too, shouldn’t be more than a few Yottabytes 🤷
You can do all of Project Gutenberg too. It’s only about 75gb, surprisingly.
ASCII text is hella lightweight.