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

[mbimmler at gmail.com]

On 12/24/08, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/12/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:
>
>> 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)
>
>
> Yes. However, it could be a valuable wiki to create privately. Generic
> hosting is (a) really cheap (b) often includes MediaWiki out the box.
> The wiki is unlikely to be vastly overloaded, so cheap hosting would
> do for a start.
>
> See http://www.sep11memories.org/wiki/In_Memoriam for a memorial
> project for victims of the World Trade Center attack, for example.
>
> Although started with a strong POV, such a project could nevertheless
> accumulate material of high quality historical and scholarly interest.
>

Oh, surely. There are also genuine academic projects 'off-wiki' that
have such aims - it just doesn't fit with my personal vision of the
Wikimedia Foundation.


>
> - d.
>
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-- 
Michael Bimmler
mbimmler at gmail.com