[Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial

Wed Dec 24 16:06:54 UTC 2008

On Wed, Dec 24, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Kurt Maxwell Weber
<kmw at outwardhosting.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 December 2008 03:10, Delirium wrote:
>> Kurt Maxwell Weber wrote:
>> > I have submitted a new project proposal, at
>> > http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Victims_of_Soviet_Repressions_Memorial
>>
>> Isn't this the sort of thing we've been in the business of slowly
>> getting out of, with the move offsite of the September 11 memorial wiki?
>> The consensus from that move seemed to be that notable victims of the
>> September 11 attacks get an article on the regular encyclopedia projects
>> (what constitutes "notable" being a different debate), and non-notable
>> ones are either redirects to a larger article discussing them or not
>> there at all, but that in either case we shouldn't be in the business of
>> hosting victim memorials.
>
> In the proposal, I make my case as to how this is essential to fulfilling the
> mission of the Wikimedia Foundation.

I'm sorry, but I stopped reading at "Understanding the destructive
effects of the most vile, most tyrannical, most despotic, most
murderous, and most capricious regime in human history necessitates
putting a "human face" on its victims."

A project which is motivated in such a way cannot possibly be anything
else than biased...and indeed, the very concept of memorials is
biased: Why should we have a memorial of the victims of Soviet
Repression, when we don't have a memorial of Nazi victims, victims of
the Armenian Genocide, victim of the Rwandan Genocide, victims of
various repression regimes in South-East Asia and China, victims in
Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic etc. etc.

No one can sensibly suggest that we can have memorial sites for every
"repression" (in lack of a better word) in history and thus, we had
better none, in my opinion.  (Yes, in other cases I argued and would
argue that it is better to have "something" than "nothing", but in
this case, I'm afraid I am not convinced of the merits of the proposal
at all and of the propriety of the motives behind it)

MIchael

-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com