For Wikipedia’s next jam, it seems like it would be incredibly cool to have a user-generated/edited, searchable site of personal historical artifacts. Like this, for instance. I found this yesterday in Frank’s top drawer. Now weirdly, he didn’t have a blog back in 1943 when this picture was taken (Lt. Frank L. Thomsen, on the right) but his generation did a version of it anyway. This picture is inscribed on back (tagged!) with who’s in it and the year.
There are skrillions of bits of history out there just like this. Personal stuff from regular folks, photos, letters, keepsakes, all tucked in drawers and shoeboxes and not out there for people to see and search and learn from. So heeeyy, Wikipedia. Can you imagine a world where an active editing community like yours scanned, sorted, and made stuff like this available? (Is there something like this already?)
That would be pretty dang awesome. And at least if there’s an electronic copy of it, it’s preserved a little.
In any event, I’m going to update with the names of the other two LTs in this picture with my grandpa. You never know who’s going to be Googling…
