GoKawiilPersonal Encyclopedias
Last year, I visited my grandmother's house for the first time after the pandemic and came across a cupboard full of loose old photos. I counted 1,351 of them spanning all the way from my grandparents in their early 20s, my mom as a baby, to me in middle school, just around the time when we got our first smartphone and all photos since then were backed up online.
Everything was all over the place so I spent some time going through them individually and organizing them into groups. Some of the initial groups were based on the physical attributes of the photograph like similar aspect ratios or film stock. For example, there was a group of black/white 32mm square pictures that were taken around the time when my grandfather was in his mid 20s.
As I got done with grouping all of them, I was able to see flashes of stories in my head, but they were ephemeral and fragile. For instance, there was a group of photos that looked like it was taken during my grandparents' wedding but I didn't know the chronological order they were taken because EXIF metadata didn't exist around that time.
So I sat down with my grandmother and asked her to reorder the photos and tell me everything she could remember about her wedding. Her face lit up as she narrated the backstory behind the occasion, going from photo to photo, resurfacing details that had been dormant for decades. I wrote everything down, recorded the names of people in some of the photos, some of whom I recognized as younger versions of my uncles and aunts.
After the "interview", I had multiple pages of notes connecting the photos to events that happened 50 years ago. Since the account was historical, as an inside joke I wanted to see if I could clean it up and present it as a page on Wikipedia so I could print it and give it to her. So I cloned MediaWiki, spun up a local instance, and began my editorial work. I used the 2011 Royal Wedding as reference and drafted a page starting with the classic infobox and the lead paragraph.
I split up the rest of the content into sections and filled them with everything I could verify like dates, names, places, who sat where. I scanned all the photos and spent some time figuring out what to place where. For every photo placement, there was a follow up to include a descriptive caption too.
Whenever I mentioned a person, I linked them to an empty stub page. After I found out I could also link to the real Wikipedia, I was able to link things to real pages that provided wider context to things like venues, rituals, and the political climate around that time, like for instance a legal amendment that was relevant to the wedding ceremony.
In two evenings, I was able to document a full backstory for the photos into a neat article. These two evenings also made me realize just how powerful encyclopedia software is to record and preserve media and knowledge that would've otherwise been lost over time.
This was so much fun that I spent the following months writing pages to account for all the photos that needed to be stitched together.
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