Anxiety at putting files in their right places

So today seems to be a freaking-out sort of a day. That's not unusual (for me), and it certainly seems that it's not unusual for the world at large this week. I tried fixing a little bug I noticed just now in the {{author}} template on English Wikisource, (in which multiple images in Wikidata are not working correctly) but of course that disappeared down a rabbit warren of code within three minutes. There's something infuriating about working on templates and modules in MediaWiki when you're accustomed to hacking on code in an IDE.

Anyway, the freaking out isn't really about that. It's more about my old question of what goes where on the web. The Internet Archive is currently being sued by publishing companies for making some books available for free online, and I read a comment on a post this morning about that, that suggested that the cost to the IA of fighting (or acquiescing to) this might be too much for it and it'd disappear. I can't really imagine that'd happen, but it's good to remember that everything we use is fragile, and should be protected if it's valuable.

Which is probably why I'm anxious today: because there are so many uncontrolled things in the world, that all I want to do sometimes is catalogue photos on Commons, and I don't like to think that even that could at some point be out of the question.

Traditionally, the answer to this sort of thing is to self-host, but that's feeling less tenable. If I run (and pay for) a server, it's surely more fragile than even dumping things on Facebook (well… maybe not FB, but how about GitHub + Flickr)? And definitely more fragile than the Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation.