[Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

Mon Sep 19 22:51:58 UTC 2005

Thanks for your comments, Lars. 

I agree with most of what you said. The primary mission of a library of memoirs like 
Wikimemory is to collect, maintain and disseminate memoirs. As Anthere rightly said the 
other day, there are already ways of doing this. People do write memoirs, those memoirs 
are sometimes printed, and the resulting books are sometimes deposited  and cataloged in 
libraries (or even made available in bookstores). Oral history projects (such as that funded 
by Steven Spielberg for Holocaust Survivors) also exist. The problem with all 
existing ‘memory’ projects, however, is that they just don’t end up recording very much.

I have been a historian of Russia for two decades, and am currently writing a book on 
Stalin’s Purges (“The Great Terror”) of the 1930s. I would love to have a huge repository 
of memoirs on the subject. True, a few exist, and some are very good. But there just aren’t 
enough to get a really good, on-the-ground picture of what happened. The same can be 
said, I think, of almost every major historical event of the 20th century and before, with the 
possible exceptions of the Holocaust and the American Civil Rights movement, both of 
which were the focus of very well funded oral history projects.

The reason good memoirs are so few and poorly disseminated is simple: they are mostly in 
books.  Books are hard to write, hard to publish, hard to move, and hard to store. It is 
true, as Lars says, there are ways to avoid book (and wikis) and record memoirs on the web 
(blogs and such). But isolated blogs a mode for building a massive memoir library (MML)
 have problems. 

1. Very few people will write blog-memoirs, so the present would still be lost to the future. 
 If, on the other hand, the publicity engine that is Wikimedia got behind WikiMemory, then 
it might become common to write your memoirs (because it was easy, fashionable, and 
“everyone’s doing it.”

2. Isolated blog memoirs would be ephemeral.  More than likely that your website (blog)
 will die when you do, so the info will be practically lost). If, on the other hand, WikiMedia 
dedicated itself to the long term preservation of the memoirs, they would be more likely to 
survive.  

3. Even if they did survive in the long term, isolated memoirs would be lost *without some 
central repository or index.* If, on the other hand, all the memoirs were in one place 
(WikiMemory) and indexed by users, then they would be pretty easy to find in 500 years.

Perhaps, as Lars suggests, a wiki might not be the right software for the project.  As long as 
the software allows the easy entry, preservation and dissemination of the memoirs in one 
place, the goal will be achieved.  And while we might be able to build a massive memoir 
library (MML) without a universally editable wiki, it seems to me that it will be difficult 
to build it without WikiMedia.

Respectfully, Marshall

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at wikimedia.org on behalf of Lars Aronsson
Sent: Mon 9/19/2005 5:38 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: RE: [Foundation-l] New Proposal: WikiMemory

Robin Shannon asked:
> 4. Why a Wiki (or, To edit or not to edit)?

And I agree that this is the important question.

Marshall Poe answered:

> To me, this is the most interesting question of all because it 
> points up a conflict between two principles.  On the one hand, 
> we want to be open and allow everyone to edit all content.  On 
> the other hand, we want to gather and disseminate the sum of 
> human knowledge to everyone, free.

In mathematical terminology, the sum (e.g. "7") is not the same 
thing as its terms (e.g. "3 + 4").  The sum can be computed from 
the terms, but once you have the sum you can no longer determine 
which the terms were.  I think that Wikipedia, using wikis, should 
disseminate the *sum* of human knowledge, because one person could 
enter 3 and another could add 4 to it, resulting in the sum. But 
this new proposed memoir project instead aims to present the 
individual components or terms, each on their own.  Other tools 
than wikis, such as blogs, are better suited for that task.

There are plenty of technical tools out there for people who want 
to set up their own blog, to report their individual memoirs.  
There are also tools that help coordinate blogging on a larger 
scale, such as del.icio.us for tagging, flickr for adding photos, 
geobloggers.com for adding geographic coordinates, and most 
recently the Google Blogsearch.

Wikipedia is also such a tool, as it allows bloggers to link to 
encyclopedic articles that provide background knowledge on places, 
people, and events.  The occurance of such links is indeed a kind 
of tagging.  You can do a Google blogsearch to find 8 known blog 
entries that link to the article [[en:Great Chicago Fire]], 
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FGreat_Chicago_Fire
which is 8 times more than you'll find through
http://del.icio.us/tag/ChicagoFire

Some future incarnation of Wiktionary could also become such a 
useful resource, but it isn't really there yet.

> but the Wikisource *edition* of the “Magna Carta” will only 
> become less valuable as it is edited further away from its 
> original, canonical state (the words as they were written in 
> 1215).

Quite correctly, this is a weakness of Wikisource as it is now 
conceived, and hardly a valid argument for using wikis for 
memoirs.

> Which is the superior principle?  I’d say it’s the 
> all-human-knowledge principle.

Nothing says one tool has to be useful for all situations.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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