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 dont end up recording very much.
I have been a historian of Russia for two decades, and am currently writing a book on Stalins 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 arent 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 everyones 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@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:
- 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%2Fwi... 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? Id say its the all-human-knowledge principle.
Nothing says one tool has to be useful for all situations.