Your comment is exactly what I’m trying to point out. If data collection was easy and free, a lot of times science would prove itself wrong. Long term effects of medication for example, is massively under studied (even short term to be honest), so pharmaceutical companies just write insane list of possible side effects even if they don’t apply to you. One example of many

Some “average joe” can try different things to help their medical condition and get results and no one would hear about it. Condition X is treated with medication Y in country Z but 90% of people get nasty side effects but hey it’s good for business. In county W, people treat it with medication V which has less side effects and is cheaper or even free. How would people in country Z hear about it?

Isn’t that what grants are?

Because there is more consistency in how Wikipedia has operated since it started existing than in most governments across different parties and mandates?

I agree with your idea but not all government have:

-desires or duty to allow their people to access information (education and science funding is usually a left wing value);

-budgets or dedicated political bodies for research, science, education that can afford it;

-a long lasting policy of open and accessible information, even accessible to foreign internet users (bandwidth costs money and why use tax money from your country to allow people abroad who don’t pay taxes to use the information?)

-consistent political views on the same topics, depending on the succession of different rulers (a new ruler in place could decide to shut down servers dedicated to science if that doesn’t fit their politics);

Etc. Ideally, it would be possible. But the fickle nature of digital information makes me wonder if publishing important papers on physical supports (no-DRM, I mean paper…) is still the most reliable and persistent way of preserving and sharing it.

But that’s how it starts. Once something is hosted, people have access to it and can work on translating it collaboratively. If 100% of all medical research was posted online and easily accessible, language barrier would not be as much of an issue as you think

My suggestion to crowd source was regarding the financing of the translation and hosting.

That could be a type of Kickstarter project that would say “we are $… away from being able to make this document fully translated and accessible for free and on the public domain for the next hundred years”.

I know it sounds counterintuitive to say that in order for something to be free to access on the Internet people have to pay, but those things would get financed very quickly and benefit a great number of people for many years.

Again, that is how Wikipedia works… and centralizing information on a famous website like Wikipedia would be a much better solution than everybody who owns important documents creating their own type of website and their own type of subscription plan and their own type of paywall…

That’s literally what they do. The most important public domain texts in History are hosted there for anyone to access them freely (which is what the Internet should be…)

I think you used the wrong word at some point but I find a lot of this mindset to prevent people from accessing information - while the internet was invented to share information with as little boundaries as possible. If it wasn’t for all the costs you mentioned, medical research could make giant leaps and lots of medical conditions would find cures faster - but somehow information paywalling gets in the way for such idealism… DaVinci lived 500 years ago - if we translate his work now the translator, although they deserve retribution (could it be crowd sourced? Helped by AI ?…) could also register it in his name and sell it instead of putting it back in the public domain. Maybe selling physical copies of things was a better answer than the impossible “everything should be free” internet dream. I’m all for physical copies personally.

Isn’t putting it on Gutenberg or Wikipedia a way to preserve, translate, digitize - for free?