Thursday, February 26, 2009

A Commons portal for Media restoration

Commons has a new portal, one for Media restoration. As it is, it is beautiful, it says well what restoration is about and, it is giving a home to the growing community of people who restore.

Commons is a repository for freely licensed material and, its content should be of value to the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Of these projects, Wikipedia is the biggest and because of its encyclopaedic nature, many of the subjects are best illustrated with historical material. When you talk for instance about Jerusalem, nobody flying into Ben Gurion airport will see Jerusalem like this..
When people talk about history, it is really hard to imagine how different things were and for these reasons historically important pictures like this are so powerful. There is a wealth of detail in a picture like this, details painstakingly restored to provide us with an impression of what once was.

Wikipedia and its sister projects have a need for quality pictures like this and it is right that the restoration process will be given more attention. This portal will help to grow this community and, by giving more attention to the great work our restorers do, we will convince archives and museums to work with us and so together we will provide our audience with a better picture of what is our past.
Thanks,
GerardM

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