Comment by _fat_santa
7 months ago
Oh no even now there is plenty of use for it outside of AI training. Just think of all the schools in villages all around the world that don't have access to the internet or have a very limited connection. I've worked with folks that would setup local "wikipedia servers" for schools so that kids could access Wikipedia via a local network connection. In other setups they just download all of wikipedia to a set of laptops and you use one of the offline readers to browse it.
This is essentially the modern version of having a library of encyclopedias.
There's already a project to serve the use case you're describing (school in a disconnected village): Internet in a Box
https://internet-in-a-box.org/
They provide offline access to Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Project Gutenberg, and many other resources.
I'm thinking less about AI training and more about having a source of (reasonably) reliable information from the net, in case AI generated fake images and generated cross referenced texts start making it too difficult to discern real history from malicious rewrites. It's bad enough now, but can get much worse with the proliferation of AI agents.
Pre-2022 Wikipedia dumps will be analyzed by future historians.
And banned by future governments.