User:Robert Harrison~metawiki/Reformat of Proposals for new projects and related pages/WikiMemory

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WikiMemory[edit]
  • Link to proposal on mailing list: [1]
  • Naming suggestions: Wikimemoir, wikimemory, wixperience, IWasTherewiki
  • Domain name: http://en.wikimemory.org/
  • Scope: The idea is to provide a place where anyone can record his or her memoirs of historically significant events. Most everyone has participated in such occurrences. Take, for example, the hundreds of thousands who suffered during the tragedy in New Orleans. Unfortunately, there is no repository for the storage of the memories of such people. Their experiences can neither be shared with others today (I, for one, would like to read first-hand accounts of the New Orleans floods), and they will be lost to history tomorrow. In ten, one hundred or one thousand years, the memoirs of those “who were there” will be very valuable. Wikimemory will, I hope, allow people all over the world to record their experiences, share them with others, and pass them to the future. I've created a mock-up of the site at http://memoirbank.com/. A nice tag line for the site: "Everyone has a story. Make yours history."
  • Details: Wikimemory
  • Proposer:Marshall Poe 6:11pm EST; September 14, 2005
  • Demonstration project: MemoryWiki.
  • Listserv: MemoryWiki Discussion List
  • People interested joining: CountessDeSaks, CowboyJeddie

Comments

  • What is the advantage of having a wiki for this? Why would people want their memoirs to be publicly editable? Wouldn't a system where each person could enter text and no one else could change that be better? See the BBC People's War site, for example. Angela 22:23, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
  • As proposer, I sort of agree with Angela and think we should seriously consider allowing memoir writers to lock their memoirs. This would preserve their integrety. We could still allow all users to add and edit meta-content (e.g., historical information about the context of the memoir, criticism of the veracity of the memoir, etc.). On the other hand, for all I know people will not care if their memoirs are editable. Neither do I know if there will be a lot of vandalism (harmful editing of memoirs). We might just have to see. I've given up on predicting human behavior!Marshall Poe
  • I agree with Angela and Marshal Poe. Wikis are great for most things, but some of the ideas here are saying that the MediaWiki software is the thing that will make everything perfect. Some things should not be editable at free will.
  • I like the idea of having people's memiors of events on a wiki. Sometimes you'll get these great stories from your grandmother, and she says that they happened 50years ago, when in fact they happened only 25years ago. Old people have a hard time remembering dates... it's better to have parts of the memoir changable.
  • MediaWiki (which Wikimedia uses to host wikis) is probably a bad choice for this project. You want a wiki with access control so that I can post my memoirs and lock them from editing by others. --Kernigh 22:55, 27 December 2005 (UTC)