Fighting the fading history of Haiti’s revolution with a wiki solution
The Louverture Project is a wiki site dedicated to preserving and extending the history of the Haitian Revolution. They intend to cover “the events leading up to the revolution, the rise of Toussaint Louverture as the leader of his country, the revolution’s impact on world history, and much, much more.” This is an impressive application of wiki technology to solve a very specific problem.
The lifeblood of Haitian culture is its oral tradition. A wiki allows a community to develop a story in collaboration, manage its own versioning, and offer multiple points of entry for new contributors. I have long suspected that the isolated individualist nature of solo-coder web publishing is unwelcoming to people from cultures that do not share the Western value of “authority” in written history. Perhaps wikis like the TLP will encourage participation among people for whom history is found in the collective power of many voices telling many stories.
