This article contains a lot of good points, even though it doesn't mention WP explicitly.

Emphasis mine.

That will always be an essential fact of Wikipedia: the history of the web doesn't make a good argument
for Wikipedia's longevity. It is very ephemeral and perishable, along with all other websites.

This is unclear to me. When the author says that digital texts degrade more easily than printed ones, is he simply saying that hosting websites fold up their tents and leave, taking their data with them?

I think so. It's certainly not true of digital texts in general, given the wide availability of archival quality CD-ROMs made for digital photos (but just as usable for text).

The reason motion picture films before 1940 didn't survive is they were mostly made of celluloid, which is incredibly flammable and not very stable, due to all that nitrocellulose. Think of it as transparent essence of smokeless gunpowder. It's amazing as much stuff survived as did. Of course there have been many film preservation projects aimed at porting all the material over onto better media, but before the digital age came to the rescue, that didn't always work so well.

My guess is that's just one of things he had in mind. Another is the fact that digital storage media such as floppy disks, hard disks, and read/write CDs are not reliable. I had hundreds of backups on floppies from the 1980s, but they were thrown out years ago when I no longer had a machine that had a 5.25-inch floppy drive. Now most people don't have 3.5-inch floppy drives either. Those R/W CDs in my experience can be very, very flaky. Hard disks were horribly unreliable in the late 1980s; they crashed constantly. Now they're about a thousand times more reliable. But if someone shoves a hard disk in your hands, do you have the smarts to hook it up and read it? Maybe you won't be able to find the proper hard-disk controller card for that particular model.

I have five computers now, and have dumpstered another eight or so since 1982. In other words, my experience isn't merely a matter of getting a better computer. It's an experience with a lot of hardware, from CP/M to MS-DOS to Mac to Win98 to XP. I don't know how many dumpsters I've filled up.

Frankly, I think those flash memory sticks are a godsend. They came along just when everything else seemed like it was unreliable. But who knows what I'll think of them ten years from now when I try to access an old archive? Will the USB standard at that time allow for reading something that old?

Paper, if kept in controlled storage conditions, lasts a long, long time. I think that's what he meant. The other day I took two huge boxes of computer programming books to Half-Price Books and they gave me only $5 for both boxes. The programming techniques described in those books were out of date because no one programs in those versions of those languages anymore. I didn't want those books taking up space, and Half-Price Books didn't want them because they cannot sell them. But they were in pristine condition, and some cost $50 each when bought new just 12 years ago. They would have lasted another 200 years — the paper was high-quality. But the information in them was obsolete. That's a striking (if mostly symbolic) example of the digital information age.

Three tons of archived nitrocellulose X-rays in a Cleveland hospital burned in 1929, killing 122 people PDF here.

Hm. Article on Wikipedia on this notable fire? *checks*

Cleveland_Clinic_fire_of_1929 (T-H-L-K-D)

A stub. Only seven edits in two years, no work in a year. Bah.

This was a lovely article. http://chronicle.com/article/5-Myths-About...rmation/127105/

It is blindingly obvious to anyone who reads the article that 'degrade' means soft degrade, rather than 'hard' i.e. physical decay. Links break very easily. Sites appear disappear. People add shit to Wikipedia.

Another reason is that the black and white ones were made with silver salts. Very many prints and even negatives were pulped to extract the silver.

Because it's stored on CD-ROM doesn't mean it's permanent and safe. Compact discs can suffer what is called "disc rot", it's the oxidation over time of the aluminium layer that holds the data, which eventually makes the disc unreadable.