[WikiEN-l] Scott McCloud on Wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 27/02/07, T P <t0m0p0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On the other hand, a lot of pop culture is ephemeral. (...)
> Do we really want articles on the latest Paris fashions, each year
> and every year?

A set of articles on 'contemporary' fashions on an annual (or biannual
or quadrennial or decade or as appropriate) cycle is, perhaps
surprisingly, a very good thing to have, from a historical
perspective. They're not really something you can easily link out to,
but it's a very interesting field of study and one where (especially
as you get older) good overview print material can become flakier.

There are people scanning 1890s ladies magazines for the fashion
pictures and uploading them to Commons, incidentally. The raw material
is there to work with.

Even if not accepted as field of historica study in its own right,
it's a useful reference source; a reliable work discussing specific
fashions of the 1530s versus the 1550s is a godsend when, for example,
trying to work out supporting information for unsourced contemporary
portraits.

(And I suspect, to a lesser degree, it's true for more contemporary
photographs. Surprisingly often you can look at an undated image and
say "before 1985" because of some detail; clothing should be able to
factor into this as well, though I don't know if it's routinely done
by archivists)

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk