Article: The JFK Assassination wiki project

[Peter Presland]

Thanks for your efforts, Peter. i wish I had more time and energy to contribute to it right now.

No problem Tracy.

When I originally started looking for timeline software for DPF a year or so ago, what stood out was the plethora of available options to display timelines - and very fancy and impressive-looking many are too - cosmetically at least. But the one big problem with all that I looked at was that the xml, JSON or whatever files that held their displayed timeline events had to be prepared externally. It was thus next to impossible to make them genuinely crowd-sourced.

The big advantage with the wiki approach is that each event is a stand-alone page that can be created and edited by any registered user. The pages can be edited and added to just like any other wiki page and each has its own dedicated talk page where differences over minutiae can be ironed out. It thus has potential to facilitate complex research collaborations. And, since u-t-d backups of the site are publicly available, people can have confidence that, should it disappear for whatever reason, someone somewhere can and probably will resurrect it.

Anyway, I intend to plod on with it and set up a few other timelines too - especially for UK controversial stuff like the deaths of David Kelly, Diana Princes of Wales and the Spy-in-a-bag Gareth Williams. There are clearly many more candidates and any registered user can start one.