User:Donald Trung/Creating to preserve Vs. Preserving to create

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This is an essay written about my main two ✌🏻 (2) styles of uploading and why I do them, while also trying to convince its readers why they should engage in these. The basic thought 💭 behind this essay is that content creation inspires more content creation while preserving content from deletion inspires the creation of new content based on it.

Basic premise and definitions

My general philosophy in uploading files 📁 to Wikimedia Commons centers mostly about “telling a story”, this story doesn’t have to be started or finished on Wikimedia Commons itself, in fact it could (and should be able to be) told anywhere, the files 📁 here are just complimentary to this goal 🥅, but if a full story could be told here I will attempt to do so but the stories I wish 🌠 to tell are simply too expansive for me to realistically complete here. Let’s use the example of the story of the cash coin, this story is intertwined with that of the Chinese charms, Chinese amulets, and Chinese talismans, it’s intertwined with that of the sycees, and it's intertwined with that of the economic history of the Orient. For me to tell this story here I can’t simply import the images from one website and call it a day, there are simply far too many of them scattered across not only all corners of the internet but also offline. In fact to tell the story of the cash coin using Wikipedia alone to import the information is far from enough, in fact without the images of cash coins on Wikimedia Commons this is impossible, but the story here takes more turns than it on Wikipedia, in fact many variants here are listed and represented that go into far more detail than the simple written information. But here the potential exists that future writers ✍🏻 can engage with these images and write ✍🏻 about them, but my main goal 🥅 here isn't in fact to create… but to preserve, the content from Scott Semans’ World Coins, Gary Ashkenazy's Primaltrek / Primal Trek, Vladimir Belyaev’s Chinese Coinage Web Site (Charm.ru), and John Ferguson’s Sportstune.com were all brought to Wikimedia projects not to simply tell the story of Chinese numismatic culture, but to preserve it in case any of those websites ever get lost. Now why I upload my photographs is a completely different story but basically based on the same underlying principle, the photographs I take are to preserve the pictured subject, to allow future generations to access it. But while with the imported stuff I hope 🤞🏻 that future 🔮 creators don’t lose whatever potential we have today but didn't manifest, with my own photographs I create things so others in the future 🔮 (both near and distant) can access what we today take for granted, while everyone is busy reporting on multi-nationals and grand cities I take my camera 📷 to the small and local. Future 🔮 local historians will find my works and be able to use them however they please, and give an accurate representation of today, to tell the story of today. But for today to be told tomorrow it needs to be documented first 🥇, historians shouldn’t just document 📃 the past in a neutral and unbiased way but the present as well, and doing this through photography might be an important, yet often overlooked thing we today can do in service of our generational successors.

Creating to preserve

I have very limited amount of time ⌚, well… death 💀 comes for us all so we all have, but on top of that I'm a busy person who can only invest so much of my free time ⌚ in what I can do. So for me the choice becomes whether or not not only to take the picture 📷 but to upload it within my time schedule, back in the days when I was still an active Wikipedian I let hundreds of photographs unuploaded to focus on writing ✍🏻 a number of Wikipedia articles like “w:en:Qianlong Tongbao” and as a result after my wife dropped her LG K10 (2018) into a river in The Hague those photographs were lost. But while I am no longer very active on Wikipedia I still have to choose whether I should focus my efforts on importing from websites to Wikimedia Commons or my own original content, I hope 🤞🏻 that when I’m done with the latter that I could focus on the former but the sheer volume of the tasks at hand ✋🏻 could mean that my retirement from everything not related to photograph could take some time ⌚ longer than I had hoped.

My own photography has “saved” several events and minor companies from being forgotten forever, many people don’t bother making a photograph of a local shop except for maybe its owners and all they do is maybe post it to the Facebook and after their company closes they delete their Facebook page 📃 and no record ⏺ of them could be found other than maybe a registration in some municipal records. One day in the future 🔮 their descendants are looking for their family history and want to know everything about them “how did their shop 🏪 look like?”, “what did they sell?”, “How did their business 🕴🏻 work?”, and “how did their logo / emblem 🔱 look like?” that’s where I come in documenting those things. Not only that but while many shops may even have Wikipedia articles, but whatever reason no-one writing ✍🏻 about them ever bothers taking pictures of them. To the reader, a photograph can tell a thousand stories, but an article only one.

My “job” isn’t to “advertise” or “promote” any of the subjects I'm photographing, it’s to document 📃 and preserve them. I’ve had a lot of bad 🙅‍♀️ experiences with many of the subjects I photograph, in fact I added a photograph to a Wikipedia of a shop that practically scammed me and then insulted me when I notified the police 👮‍♀️ of their actions. But when documenting the present one shouldn’t show biases, one can’t read 📖 which shops I like or dislike simply by reading 📖 what I wrote about them. It’s about documenting the present, not forming a narrative.

The most important thing us “photographers of the Commons” do is preserve and document 📃 subjects we photograph, we can’t educate people about a subject without first documenting it. The shortsighted would say that only the historicity of the past would count, because even when you’re done reading 📖 this sentence the moment you started this was in the past. However what can be preserved on Wikimedia Commons despite the huge volume of files 📁 stored here is fairly limited, this is because non-free 🆓 works aren’t allowed, and although a great deal 🤝🏻 of photographs could document major events if photographs of these events can’t be freely released by the photographer than the event can’t be documented here. As I tend to photograph places which have fairly permissive Freedom of Panorama laws a great deal 🤝🏻 can be preserved. The main drive behind a large 🤪 chunk of the content I create is to preserve it for future generations, of course future 🔮 creators will be able to use these works as well.

Preserving to create

One of the reasons I love 💘 importing works to Wikimedia Commons from various other websites is because I can then preserve these works to create more content in the future 🔮, or allow others to create more works in the future 🔮. As I’m interested in almost everything I try to preserve as much as possible for the sake 🍶 of preserving it, my main motivator in this case it the eternal fear 😱 that one day these works shall become unavailable due to the closure of the hosting source. This is something that I’ve unfortunately witnessed countless of times on the internet as the average webpage doesn't exactly have a long span of existence. In order to combat this I import these files 📁 to Wikimedia Commons as this is backed by servers supported by a huge amount of donation money 💴 as opposed to small vendors with only limited resources to keep their websites afloat while their content are invaluable resources with an educational value that could be lost if the website(s) are ever lost.

For that reason I’ve spent the majority of my on-wiki and even a large part of my off-wiki time ⌚ “rescuing” these resources, the end goal isn't only to preserve them for “direct intellectual consumption” but to lay the basis for future 🔮 expansions and content creation (as I believe that “content creation begets content creation”). If you want to read 📖 more about a subject in the future 🔮 that you like to learn about then you should import all texts and media (if possible) or then contact the creators to donate their works. If one day the information ℹ would be lost online then there would be nothing to replace it with, anyone interested in the same subject would then have to work “from square one ❎”, but if the information is preserved on Wikimedia Commons and/or another Wikimedia project then this information might not only reach more eyes 👀 but it would also be able to be freely used by others for reference and this would create more content in the long run. The main goal isn't then to preserve exclusively to preserve for tomorrow, but to let the platforms of today stand to serve as the foundations for the works of tomorrow. I import images of numismatic subjects from websites today for both preserving it in case those websites get lost in the future 🔮 and for others to be able to create more content based on this, both on- and offline could these creators use works preserved by us. One day in my old age I hope 🤞🏻 to purchase a catalogue on Oriental numismatics and find images in it that I had originally imported from other websites to Wikimedia Commons.

Original publication 📤

Sent 📩 from my Microsoft Lumia 950 XL with Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile 📱. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 10:06, 3 December 2018 (UTC)