The Signpost

Reflections

Wikipedia, history, and the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day

This Signpost piece is adapted from an email that is part of a semi-regular series on Wikimedia-l and Wikitech-l. The editors of The Signpost would like to encourage those moved by this piece to review meta:Europeana/1914-18 for some of the WWI-related events, activities, and contributions that have been organised over the past few years, and consider their own ability to contribute.


The 11th of November is commemorated in some parts of the world as Armistice Day, Remembrance Sunday, or Veterans Day. The year 2018 marks the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day. I would like to take a moment to reflect on the subject of Armistice Day, and on the roles of Wikimedia – especially Wikipedia – in sharing knowledge of history and being a repository of our collective memory.

"Armistice Day is commemorated... to mark the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front of World War I, which took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning—the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" of 1918."[a] World War I was one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, with a total of approximately 17 million civilian and military deaths.[b]

I would like to share a story.

John McCrae in uniform circa 1914

John McCrae was a medical doctor and Canadian soldier during World War I. He wrote a famous poem, “In Flanders Fields". The poem refers to the red poppies that grew over the graves of soldiers who died in the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium. There are variants of the wording of the poem. I quote one of them below.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high!
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Here are a few images:

In our contemporary world where there are many disputes about history, resources are limited, and sometimes it is difficult to be optimistic about human nature, I am especially grateful for Wikipedia's aspiration to be a place to share neutral, reliable, and verifiable information with an open license.

Wikimedia has remarkable success at being a collaborative endeavor for the education and information of humanity. Wikimedia content is collaboratively developed by thousands of diverse individuals, many of whom are volunteers and never meet in person. Content that is shared on Wikimedia sites is viewed by millions of people around the world. Although we sometimes caution the public that Wikipedia is not a primary source, for many people Wikipedia seems to be a good starting point, and the references that we provide allow people to perform their own research regarding history and many other topics.

Thank you to everyone who documents history on Wikimedia, and to the people who support this effort behind the scenes. We all benefit from your generosity to our common memory. By documenting and learning about our history, I hope that we improve our understanding of ourselves and our potential, and can make wise decisions about our future.

I close with a poem by Catherine Munro:

THIS IS AN ENCYCLOPEDIA

One gateway to the wide garden
of knowledge, where lies
The deep rock of our past,
in which we must delve
the well of our future,
The clear water we must leave untainted
for those who come after us,
The fertile earth, in which
truth may grow in bright places,
tended by many hands,
And the broad fall of sunshine,
warming our first steps toward knowing
how much we do not know.


Ever onward,

Pine


Notes

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Catherine Munro's excellent poem put me in mind of these words by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) written in 1912 which I've always felt applied well to Wikipedia.

Gitanjali 35 (Song Offerings)
1 Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
2 Where knowledge is free;
3 Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
4 Where words come out from the depth of truth;
5 Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
6 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
7 Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action --
8 Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Lumos3 (talk) 16:27, 1 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • Honestly I am surprised that more wasn't said about World War I in this edition. You only commemorate a centennial anniversary once; I should like to have seen more...thought, or content or something put into this one. Admitedly, given how little I heard about it on November 11 I guess I should be happy that it got a mention at all, but still... TomStar81 (Talk) 14:01, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • That's just one of the problems of recentism. Because the community is gradually evolving to a point where most members don't know of important historical periods such as WWII, the 60s, or even pre-Internet. (By "know of", I'm including having parents, relatives, or older people who lived thru these periods.) It's hard to be mindful of a period such as the Great Depression when one has no personal connection to it. (Or have enough of a feel for it for one's internal bullshit detector to work.) Oversight of the end of WWI is simply the latest, & not the last, example of our lack of a sense for history. -- llywrch (talk) 21:08, 2 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Llywrch: Sad but true. In hindsight, now that I am actually thinking more about it, I'd have thought the signpost may have reached out to milhist or to the various national and/or political projects to get some input on the end of World War I. I'd have been interested to have seen what Wikipedia as a whole did during the WWI centenary years. At Wikipedia_talk:Today's_featured_article#TFA_for_WWI_centenary it was noted that there were FA-Class articles run on the front page during the WWI years. It would have been nice to build off that too and see if there were other DYKs, FPs, and so forth and when they ran. They do have remembrance and Veteran's day commemorations up here, but from a centennial anniversary the first such observations of the end of WWI weren't until 1919, while it appears from a cursory glance that the first tomb of the unknown soldier wasn't formally consecrated until 1920. Like I said, I'm just happy someone out there remembered because a bunch of people didn't - even the History Channel, which I was certain would do something for the anniversary - had no special programing airing on 11/11/2018 for the centenial end World War I. — Preceding unsigned comment added by TomStar81 (talkcontribs) 16:27, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the centenary of the end of the First World War was not a big thing in the US (perhaps it rained) but it was in Europe, as World War I centenary and Category:Centenary of World War I and related articles show. Lest we forget. 213.205.240.196 (talk) 19:11, 3 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • That could be too - the US was late to the party. Still lost a bunch of men in the fighting though, but not an unreasonable hypothesis for the absence of commemorating material. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:52, 4 December 2018 (UTC)[reply]

















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