Wikipedia:There is a deadline

This is an essay.

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.

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This page in a nutshell: The preservation or survivability of the world's knowledge is at stake. Contribute it to Wikipedia before it's too late.

The lost Library of Alexandria, only one of many destroyed libraries in antiquity, lost long before Wikisource had the chance to save their contents

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.

Before 20th century

The Libraries of Alexandria, House of Wisdom and Constantinople are among many great libraries of the ancient world to have been destroyed. As well, many ancient Chinese encyclopedias are partially or completely lost to history.
The medieval archives of Gozo were destroyed during the Ottoman invasion of 1551.
Diego de Landa's burning of the Maya codices in 1562. Only four are known to have survived. Most knowledge of Maya history is thus lost.
The Beeldenstorm that spread through the Low countries in 1566 in which many statues and religious artifacts of the Catholic Church were destroyed by iconoclasts.
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.

20th century

Churches, monasteries, convents and libraries were destroyed during the Spanish Civil War.
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.
A storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Film Corporation's pre-1935 movies. 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.
Hundreds of libraries and archives were destroyed and their contents lost during World War II.
A fire in the National Library of Peru destroyed highly valued historical works in 1943.
More than 6,000 Tibetan monasteries were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, along with unique statues, tapestries and manuscripts.
The National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was shelled and burnt to the ground, along with thousands of irreplaceable texts, in the Siege of Sarajevo in 1992 during the Bosnian War.
Some of the original Apollo 11 moon landing tapes in high quality have been recorded over and lost. However, all the data was copied as archived in several locations at the time.
In June 1981, during the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Jaffna Public Library was burnt by Sinhalese Buddhist mobs, destroying over 97,000 rare books and manuscripts in the process.
During the Romanian Revolution of 1989, a fire was started in the Central University Library of Bucharest and over 500,000 books, along with 3,700 manuscripts, were burnt.

Modern examples

Unfortunately, the destruction of knowledge has not ceased with Wikipedia's inception in 2001. Here are a few examples.

2000s

In 2003, the Iraq National Library and Archive and other buildings were looted and burnt during the U.S. invasion.
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.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake damaged or destroyed libraries and archives in several countries.
On October 17, 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.
In 2009, the Historical Archive building of the City of Cologne collapsed.
On October 26, 2009, GeoCities was shut down, removing from public view 38 million pages built by users over 15 years. It was only partially preserved by Archive Team.

2010s

In 2010, much of Haiti's heritage was damaged or destroyed in an earthquake. Little over a month later, Chile's heritage suffered similar destruction in its own earthquake.
The Egyptian Museum was looted during the 2011 Egyptian revolution.
In December 2011, a fire destroyed all but 30,000 of the 200,000 books in the historic Egyptian Scientific Institute.
In May 2012, shrines forming part of the Timbuktu World Heritage Site were destroyed by the Islamist group Ansar Dine.
Some buildings and churches were damaged in the 2012 Northern Italy earthquakes.
In June 2012, many documents were burned during a fire at the secretarial building of Mumbai.
Syrian heritage has been damaged, destroyed and looted during the Syrian Civil War.
On October 15, 2013, the Bohol earthquake destroyed and damaged several iconic sites.
On December 25, 2013, the Santuario da Virxe da Barca was destroyed by a fire resulting from lightning.
The Al Sa’eh Library in Tripoli, Lebanon, with 80,000 books and manuscripts, was burnt down in January 2014.
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) damaged Mosul Museum artifacts, Mosul Public Library books and other cultural heritage sites like the ancient temples of Baalshamin and Bel.
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.
On May 23, 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.
The April 25, 2015, Nepal earthquake damaged and destroyed centuries-old buildings in the UNESCO World Heritage sites in the Kathmandu Valley, including some at Kathmandu Durbar Square.
On April 26, 2016, National Museum of Natural History, New Delhi and its entire collection were destroyed by fire.
A museum dedicated to Nicola Filotesio stood in the town of his birth until it was destroyed in the August 2016 Central Italy earthquake.
A fire burned down the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018, destroying more than 90 percent of its collection of more than 20 million objects. Many holdings, such as records of extinct languages, were one-of-a-kind and irreplaceably lost.
In March 2019, Myspace announced that it had lost all music uploaded between 2003 and 2015.
By the late 2010s, several film archives in Venezuela started being damaged and lost due to neglect.

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.
In April 2021, the University of Cape Town Jagger Library was damaged by a wildfire, threatening its collection of African antiquities.
On July 29, 2021, the Cinemateca Brasileira was hit by a fire, the fifth in its history.
Many Ukrainian cultural sites have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum, the Kuindzhi Art Museum, and the Club 8-bit computer museum were destroyed by bombardment, while cultural centers like the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center and the Korolenko Chernihiv Regional Universal Scientific Library were damaged.
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.
The January 2025 Southern California wildfires destroyed several important locations, including The Bunny Museum.

Future threats

Today, many of the world's languages are endangered or nearly extinct. 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.

Furthermore, hundreds of websites are closed every day on the Internet; the average life of a web page is only 77 days. Those websites work in many cases as references. Projects like the Internet Archive or WebCitation and volunteer groups like Archive Team 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.

There is a deadline. This is a battle against time.