Wikimedia Foundation, the parent non-profit behind Wikipedia, shares similar sentiments, explaining how maintaining over 65 million articles already requires careful budget allocation, which the current turbulence has only exacerbated. A spokesperson told 404 Media that it sees "the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders."
Beyond the shortage, the AI boom has managed to affect archival efforts in another way that's likely not reversible: scraping. LLMs are trained on huge chunks of data often acquired from the internet, sometimes even illegally . As you'd expect, a lot of sites don't appreciate being randomly scraped to become part of some AI's learning material, so they've put up countermeasures that prevent companies from doing so.
Archiving the internet shares the same first step — it needs to extract information in order to preserve it, but website operators have been increasingly blocking such efforts . Bots that would otherwise scrape a site just to produce a snapshot for educational purposes are now being treated the same way as a bot looking to gather information for artificial intelligence, unintentionally or not.
People in the community who contribute to preservation efforts are also having to think twice about what to preserve. Since hard drives are so expensive now, even enthusiasts part of the r/DataHoarders subreddit are doom-posting about how they've stopped archiving entirely, waiting for prices to level out. You can occasionally find deals, but seeing a large-capacity drive at MSRP has become nearly impossible.
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/internet-archival-sites-struggling-to-preserve-the-internet-because-of-skyrocketing-hard-drive-prices-due-to-the-ai-boom-wayback-machine-and-wikimedia-punished-by-stratospheric-storage-pricing-and-stricter-anti-scraping-measures-blocking-the-wrong-bots#main
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