2011/10/14 David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> > > I love Cracked. It's Wikipedia with dick jokes. > > http://www.cracked.com/article_19453_6-reasons-were-in-another-book-burning-period-in-history_p2.html > > To be ha ha only serious for a moment, this touches on why we all > bother doing this.
It depressed me. Thank you for ruining my weekend. But seriously: 1. It's not really news for me: My professors have been talking very angrily about the secret book destruction operations for years and Asaf Bartov, the founder of BYP [1], who now works for the WMF, have been frequently lecturing about this. But Cracked have put it in a very understandable format. 2. Since Cracked is rather popular, this is an opportunity to publicize Wikisource, one of Wikimedia most wonderful endeavors. It is criminally under-publicized now. 3. Is there any project, anywhere, to systematically find books that are going to be irrecoverably destroyed and to digitize them? I'd argue that it's more important to digitize them before the more popular titles, which are less likely to be lost forever. I would also support the WMF investing money in collaborating with libraries doing it. BYP, mentioned above, is doing something like this; it is a bunch of volunteers, working on a shoestring budget in a small country. Is anybody else doing it? [1] http://www.benyehuda.org/e_faq.html -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
