I think that I speak for nearly everyone in the world who’s been on the internet that Wikipedia is an amazingly useful website. Just blows my mind the ways I use it and to think of what I had to do to find the same information before it came around.
But while Wikipedia is a great site for THE information on a topic at this very moment, what about the historical record?
Many times I’ve wanted to “go back in time” and get a perspective on something at a certain moment in time. What would the wiki page for the band Duran Duran have been in 1987? Where would I find discussion on the “latest” add by Pepsi in 1992?
We all know it’s easier to look back at what happened with rose colored glasses and think that’s really how it was. But it wasn’t. Things were different at every moment in time. Those moments are being written over every time someone updates a wiki entry to make it “up to date.”
So the idea would be to have an entire wiki for each year going back in time. People could write entries on places, people, events, products that existed at that moment in time. One could only reference that moment as “the present” and could also talk of anything previous, but the future was just the future.
Would a wiki for every year be enough? Need one for every month?
Of course, there would be a lot of extrapolating to fill in the historicalwiki record, but there’s a lot of data out there from the past that’s floating around, uncategorized. Libraries have archives with first hand materials from various ages. Companies have archives full of product advertisements from all points in the distant past.
This would be the perfect framework to catalog that past, as well as keep a running tab on the future of presents and pasts still to come.
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