LL-L "Resources" 2008.12.04 (02) [E]

Thu Dec 4 18:16:16 UTC 2008

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L O W L A N D S - L - 03 December 2008 - Volume 02
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From: Jonny <jonny.meibohm at arcor.de>
Subject: LL-L "Media"

Dear Lowlanners and Ron,

though I'm not sure about the LL-L relevance of this topic I found it to be
an important step in internet developement and thus to inform all of you. I
think we'll get very interesting new sources, in special for historical
matters

Have a look into this site, if you're able to deal with a minimum level of
German.

http://www.netzeitung.de/internet/1225917.html

I wish you a nice evening from a very cold and 'un-gemuetlich' Northern
Germany!

Jonny Meibohm

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Resources

Thanks, Jonny.

Lowlanders, I don't advocate a lengthy off-track discussion here. But let me
just briefly mention that the German article Jonny refers to and also
articles linked to it deal with the growing importance of the Wikipedia as
well as freedom of speech and freedom of access to information in general.

Germany's Federal Archives now shares ca. 100,000 digitized pictures with
the Wikipedia, and the Wikipedia will in turn help to identify and date as
many as possible.

Related and linked articles report that several people, including some
German politicians and organizations, perceive the Wikipedia as a threat in
that they disagree with certain descriptions and characterizations in it. As
is typical in such instances, they point to what they think is uncontrolled
access and dissemination of information by an amorphous group of people.
Off-center politicians seem to insinuate that these people are a rag-tag
band of biased radicals and are thus dangerous. This is felt especially by
those off-center politicians that feel that articles about them were
distortions, at least before they leaned on the Wiki folks by insisting on
numerous revisions. And, yes, some of these politicians call for banning the
Wikipedia. In other words, we are dealing with the electronic age's version
of book burning.

What is particularly interesting to me is that in this context there is only
talk about the German edition of Wikipedia and pretty much no mention of the
fact that this is a global effort using large numbers of languages. This
points toward the fact that, due to being international and not centralized,
the Wikipedia effort can not be controlled or indeed stopped by anyone other
than the Wikipedia staff itself, and this is apparently very frustrating to
some. This may be a sign of the time, a time that we are likely to look back
to as one of profound change, perhaps even a time of unprecedented
emancipation and assertion due to the establishment of the Internet and due
to non-governmental and non-commercial international efforts to create
global access to resources and information. Calls for and implementation of
governmental bans (blocking access) indicate just how threatening this is in
the eyes of some. Personally, I believe that their efforts will be unable to
halt these international volunteer efforts in the long run. ("Power to the
people"?)

I suppose the most important thing is that the Wikipedia effort stay on
track, aim for high standards of truth, fairness and independence, and
remain true to the initial concept.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

•

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