
After the jump, my favorite screenshot from the project.This particular book – or rather, set of books – is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article's inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.
It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes "Saddam Hussein was a d---head".
And for the first time in history, we're building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information. Everything should have a history button. We need to talk about historiography, to surface this process, to challenge absolutist narratives of the past, and thus, those of the present and our future.





















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9.08.10
By Sharanne Wick
One great question looms: Why? No, not why are they boring; that is evident from the paragraph shown. Why were they written? And why a whole series of them? What a waste of paper. But I guess it at least kept a few people employed to produce them.
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9.09.10
By valerie
OK. Ask me how I just KNEW that your ''favorite'' screen shot would be one with something anti-American in it? Ask me, go on. I dare ya.
(Head exploding from all the predictable anti-US cr*p on websites like these...)
All the idiots who screamed about how the USA was just going to Iraq to steal their oil should be made to write on huge public chalkboards 100 times ''I will not automatically and without any justification whatsoever think the worst of America''.
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9.09.10
By Kelly
I think the point was how "stoopid" the person was. I'd rather see them show this idiot than someone who "are belong to the US."
9.09.10
By Mitch
Nobody but the author and maybe the deluded publisher thinks every point and counterpoint of the Iraq War is "infinitely valuable."
A war that even History wants to forget represents very little of infinite value.
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