Having a go

The past week has been a bit about having a go at different platforms which need public interaction in order for them to develop and be relevant. After having a go at editing a Wikipedia page, and not being completely happy with that experience, I was a bit sceptical about the other platforms but found them easy to use and sites that I might use in the future.


The first thing I had a go at was Billion Graves. I have used Ancestry.com to look for family records but had never heard of Billion Graves. It allows the public to upload pictures of grave head stones and transcribe the information on the headstone to allow the public to search for a particular person. 


I decided I was not comfortable taking pictures of the headstones of people I did not know or knows relatives I did not know, so I tool a picture of my grandparents shared grave. I transcribed some of the head stones put up by other people, to allow them to be searchable. 

I think the down side of Billion Graves is that it's hard to find links between peoples headstones and the rest of their family. You can search for a certain person, made easier if you know their birth or death date (and these things have been correctly transcribed correctly) but it's hard to go in blind.  

I also had a go at editing a Trove article. I have used Trove quite a lot, for both personal research and for university courses, and it really is an invaluable resource. I founded the process of editing quite easy, and I did some newspaper articles who mentioned a relative of mine, whose life has always been a little mysterious. I think that I will try to do some editing on more Trove articles, especially when I am looking for something myself and need realise that there are issues. 

The last thing I tried was Flickr. I have never used Flickr for personal photos, I have always used Facebook. Last year however, I wrote an essay about a set of photos from a Documentary Photography Project in America in the 1970s entitled Documerica. Using it then made me realise how useful it is, as it allows for a simple and public way of sharing photos. It has meant that the Documerica project has gained greater publicity and allows people to see interesting photos of America's past. 

I made a personal Flickr account (but then I forgot my username!), so will have to make a new one. It seems like a good way of sharing photos, especially with people who don't have Facebook. 

All of these platforms rely on other people to contribute to them in order for them to survive. This would save in costs for the company, however, I can't help but think that there is also room for mistakes that can go unnoticed. Wikipedia has checks, but it is still easy to falsify (see this article for some good ones) and on Billion Graves it would be very easy to make mistakes when transcribing headstones.