Man Is The Media.
Europeana, The European Wikipedia Alternative is Back Online
January 14th, 2009 by Martin
The database and portal for European culture is back online. I mentioned them a while ago as an EU alternative to mainly US-based information aggregation services (such as Google and Wikipedia). When they first launched they crashed due to overwhelming traffic.
Have a look. I tried searching for famous wild painter Karel Appel (he’s Dutch) and while they do find a number of video and pictures (some are dead links) it does not in one word mention who he was (unlike this excellent Wikipedia article). But they are still in beta, so let’s give them room to improve.
Their mission statement:
The European Commission’s goal for Europeana is to make European information resources easier to use in an online environment. It will build on Europe’s rich heritage, combining multicultural and multilingual environments with technological advances and new business models.
From a macro level its hard not to view Europeana as an attempt to maintain and treasure the ‘old world dominance’ Europe once had as the founder of Western culture. But whatever the background may be, I highly applaud the initiative as I’m sure cultural gems will surface for the benefit of all of us.
It seems their approach is much more editorially anchored (project management mainly by librarians and historians) than crowdsourced phenomenons such as Wikipedia. Take for instance the mail they just sent me. It was written in six different languages which underlines just one of the problems they face. Unless they give up at least some control and involve their users more they’ll be more dependent on a constant inflow of Euros.
