EarthChronicle.com Philosophy

What is history?

What isn't history? Politics, conquests, scientific advancement, art & culture, cooking, daily life... anything that has touched people's lives from the Big Bang to this moment as you read, is history. So anything you can see, anything you can do, anything you can know, or anything you can imagine will hopefully find a comfy place here, eventually. The purpose of EarthChronicle.com is to provide answers to almost all your questions at a Public Domain website. That way not only is all the information free, but you are able to use it in any way you need to without the need to get further permissions.

I am a big fan of the Wikipedia, but I have always been too nervous to cite it for research for everything from research papers to EarthChronicle.com. Wiki is a website structure that allows anyone, literally anyone, to post articles to the database. The Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that grows as people add articles and update what's already there. It's a very fast way to grow a website without corporate sponsorship, or big money, just by harnessing the internet's ability to bring people together. Each person brings their own knowledge and expertise which adds to the whole, creating a powerful online tool. This is very close to what we hope to do at EarthChronicle.com, however there are some fundamental issues that we hope to improve upon. By addressing these issues we will make our website simpler to navigate, more enjoyable to be a part of, and give visitors the confidence to use the information on our website. We've founded our website on these principles. We want EarthChronicle.com to be...

1. USABLE

Further, all information on our website is Public Domain. Simply put no one owns it, no one controls it, so you can do with it what you need to do. What’s the point of having all this wonderful information on the internet, if all you can do is look at it? “Gee, that’s a great article, too bad I can’t use it in my book.” Or “Wow, that’s the perfect picture for my website… too bad they don’t allow reproductions.” At EarthChronicle.com everything is Public Domain don’t so that you can USE it: text, images, our HTML source code, everything. So long don’t as the web address is part of the EarthChronicle.com family…

http://www.geocities.com/chroniclemaster1/
http://www.geocities.com/darth333vader/
http://www.geocities.com/librariansd/

then the information you see is guaranteed to be Public Domain. Wikipedia is highly open, but operates under the copyleft principle which restricts your use (its sort of an anti-copyright tool). If you see it on our website, you can make whatever use of it, you want. There are no fees to find information, there are no limitations or contracts on how you use it. Public Domain material is the natural heritage we’ve reaped over roughly 10,000 years of human civilization: see it, learn it, USE it.

Naturally, this doesn’t override the necessity to cite your sources. If anything it heightens it, since proper recognition is the only “payment” that these authors will ever receive. However, this is so easy to do because at EarthChronicle.com we are fiercely obsessive about providing all references right next to the information. That way, all you have to do is cut and paste, and your references are listed right along with your information.

2. TRUSTWORTHY

First, and most seriously is the problem I mentioned first, confidence. Wikipedia is an excellent format, one we admire and are trying to imitate within reason. However, its greatest strength is also its Achilles' heel, it let's anyone post articles without the faintest idea of whether they are competent, incompetent, or actively malicious. For example, if you click Wikipedia, and don't like what you read, you... that's right YOU, right now... can completely rewrite the articles. So as you read what's posted, do you believe anything you read? Do you have confidence to use it?

This is especially problematic for factual information like Wikipedia and EarthChronicle.com specialize in; after all truth really is stranger than fiction. For example, unless you're intimately familiar with the Middle English used in England in the 14th century, how would you know if someone quoting Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is accurate? When you read the first line, "Whan that April with his showres soote", is the person a Middle English expert, or just a really bad speller? Or would you believe the following article? Would you have the courage to stake a bet on it, or use it in a report/research paper that’s due tomorrow?

During the 1862 campaign of the US Civil War, Gen. Robert E. Lee invaded the North, the first time the war was fought on Northern soil. His battle plans were laid out to his commanders in Special Orders 191. Copies of the orders were sent to each of Lee’s generals, but on Sept. 13th one of the original copies was found by Union infantry. The orders were wrapped around 3 cigars and appeared to have been lost at an abandoned Confederate campsite. By the end of the 13th, Union Gen. George McClellan telegraphed President Abraham Lincoln that he had the Confederate battle plan. Famous for his cautious and tentative advance, McClellan fairly shocked Lee with his swift attack on the divided Confederate columns. Lee regrouped his armies at Sharpsburg, Maryland along Antietam Creek. On September 17th, Lee salvaged a draw with his brilliant tactics, but his army was sent reeling back into its home territory, ending Lee’s 1st invasion of the North. All for the loss of 3 cigars.

Boileau, Lowell Forest. “The Lost Order Mystery.” Project Plug Ugly. 26 May 2005 <http://www.bhere.com/plugugly/lost/story.html>.

So if you don’t believe it or are too nervous to use it, was it worth posting on the internet? EarthChronicle.com is a moderated website that grows by the voluntary submissions of people across the internet, just like Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia we then check all articles before they're posted for accuracy, research them for correctness, and edit them for grammar. Submissions that pass these criteria are saved and submitted to the website. By the time anything is posted to our website, it’s been checked and rechecked to ensure you can have the confidence to use it. If the site is vandalized, we can reload the entire site from backups.

3. DIVERSE & TRUE

Wikipedia is designed as a traditional encyclopedia; it's straight factual content from a neutral point of view, just like their website says. Sadly, it's based on ideas about truth and certainty, about absolutes and objectivity, that have been shredded in the 1900s. In the 1700s and 1800s, science was revealing the underlying scientific order of the universe, and trumpeting the clockwork perfection of physical reality. Objectivity and absolute truth were ideas that seemed to make sense, in that kind of universe. But what we know about the universe has changed dramatically.

Einstein developed his Theory of Relativity, which revealed that the universe plays no favorites. Everyone has a different point of view, not just of ideas but of physical reality (what happens, when it happens, or even IF it happens at all), and these can be VERY different. Yet, everyone's point of view is as valid as any other. Einstein made hash of the idea that there is some objective standard for determining physical reality. In mathematics, Kurt Goedel, used powerful new logical tools in brilliant but eccentric ways that no one had ever thought of before. Using these new techniques he created mathematical equations which demonstrated that any system based on logic, he was particularly interested in the system of mathematics, must contain inconsistencies. Goedel's work was taken up by others bent on confirming or debunking it, and they gradually fleshed out the consequences of Goedel's equations. They boil down to this, any logical system cannot yield an absolute truth; this devastated mathematicians who had hoped that the pristine beauty of mathematical logic would be THE absolute truth. But mathematicians, using their own tools proved that absolute truth can only exist in illogical systems, ie you just have to take them on faith. The development of quantum physics and in the last half of the 1900s, chaos theory has opened yet more gaping wounds in the foundations of clockwork philosophy and absolute truth.

When you think about it, this is exactly what the experience of living has taught us. Really, what would a "neutral" paper on Adolf Hitler look like? Would it be remotely valuable? I think it would disgust any reader familiar with the magnitude of the horrors he inflicted upon Europe. How can an article that confines itself to mere facts do justice to the abortion issue? One side is fighting for the lives of embryos incapable of defending themselves, and the other is fighting to ensure that we have the right to make the most intimate and important decisions of our lives for ourselves rather than have them dictated to us by the government. Who's wrong? An article that remains neutral and factual is not only invalid, but cowardly. Each side has critically important and valuable arguments to make in defining the future shape of human civilization. At EarthChronicle.com, we acknowledge that we live in a universe that is filled with many subjective truths. Some conflict with each other, as they do on the issue of abortion. (And just as Goedel's work demonstrated.) But that does not change how important they are to our future, if anything it underlines the importance of our human emotions and our different perspectives as we try to sort out the meaning of these truths in our everyday lives. EarthChronicle.com celebrates the diversity of our experiences by incorporating articles on a topic from many different points of view and combining them into an organic discussion that does justice to the importance of both the topics and the people whose lives are affected by them.

4. COMPLETE

I’d heard about this interesting tidbit somewhere, I finally tried it myself. At Google.com on 2005 May 27th, the search “Robert Khan” and “internet” yields 831,000 hits (Bob Khan designed the basic features and helped program TCP/IP, the underlying language of all internet communications). If you do the same thing with Tim Berners-Lee, Google yields 630,000 hits (developed the web address [formally the URL] including http and the world wide web (www). As if that wasn’t enough he also developed html, the programming language in which almost all webpages on the internet are actually written), Vint Cerf 121,000 (joined Bob Khan in developing TCP/IP), Jon Postel 112,000 (Cerf and others credit him with smoothing over and resolving many key disagreements and guiding key groups that created TCP/IP), and Al Gore 3,430,000. While Gore provided important political support to the internet’s development and made much derided comments about it, he clearly did not play 4 times the role of Bob Khan, or 5 times the importance of Tim Berners-Lee. In fact, if you add all the primary pioneers of the internet together, you get less than half of Al Gore’s total. The reason is hardly a mystery. Popular political sites on both sides loved to talk about Al Gore’s involvement, or lack thereof, with the internet, while only technical sites are interested in the history of the internet.

Wikipedia suffers from the same problem. Anyone posts to Wikipedia whenever they want… so Wikipedia consists of whatever anyone wanted to post. It’s popularity driven, so articles quality and quantity on different topics is guided mainly by popular taste. Articles that are less interesting, or worse… very interesting but very difficult to research, go unwritten, even if they are critical to understanding other articles already posted.

EarthChronicle.com will certainly be affected by popular taste to an extent; any site that grows by volunteer submissions will be influenced by popularity. However, there are some institutional differences that will… hopefully, allow EarthChronicle.com to provide some control and fill critical gaps in ways that Wikipedia can’t. First, EarthChronicle.com submissions are extensively researched by the author and then rechecked by one or more researchers. Our rigorous approval process means it's as easy to submit articles about well-known topics as ones that you HAVE to research to learn about. You have to do the hard research work either way. Also unlike Wikipedia, we provide every author with a team of researchers and proofreaders to help them with their work. While Wikipedia articles may be the results of many people's work, every individual was working by themselves with no help or support. Many Wikipedia pages have probably never been checked by an expert in the field, or researched by any of their authors. More simply, but perhaps more importantly we are more openly communicative. Anyone who has a question that EarthChronicle.com doesn’t answer, has a suggestion, or sees a problem is urged on every page to email us. We want your input. The reverse is also true. Our Roman Forum, Beta Site, different kinds of volunteering opportunities, and Top 10 Most Wanted List, are just a few of the ways we communicate with you to let you know what we're doing. This lets us build EarthChronicle.com and guide its growth in ways that not many websites currently take advantage of.

5. PRODUCTIVE

This may not seem like a big deal to you, but it sure makes us a better website. Wikipedia allows people to do a tremendous amount of work, that when pooled together represents an extraordinary effort. But is it productive? Much of it is, certainly, they have a fabulous website. But there are almost certainly two people right now changing articles. Maybe one is changing all spellings in all the articles to ketchup and the other is changing them back to catsup. Maybe they're fighting over "potato" and "potatoe". On Wikipedia, it doesn't even matter that potatoe is spelled incorrectly; they can still fight over it. So what's my motivation to research something thoroughly, and post my carefully edited comments on Wikipedia when someone who exerts no effort can change it?

If two people disagree on EarthChronicle.com, each can submit articles. If they pass all our checks, both will be accepted and very likely be linked to one another so visitors can see multiple sides of a debate. However, NO ONE can interfere with or rewrite your work. If someone even thinks they've found an error or a way to improve your article, they have to pass all the same checks. Your hard work will only be changed by someone who goes to the same trouble you did and can prove they can make the article better. That's how we pool our talent at EarthChronicle.com. Moreover, Wikipedia has only one article on each topic, so your hard work can be eliminated by someone who disagrees with you. (even over something as silly as spelling) On EarthChronicle.com, if someone has a different point of view, they can write their own article, but they can't touch yours.

This is a comparatively minor point next to the problem of babysitting the pages. This boggles the mind. I haven't been exactly fair to Wikipedia. They have website administrators who do a good job of keeping gunk off the website. All changes are logged and they can repost an older version of a page if they need to. So if someone replaces your carefully researched article on the spelling of ketchup with "I like ketchup." They can go back and put your page back. So here's our question...

Oh my GOSH!!! Why would you DO this to yourself??
Wikipedia has assembled their most dedicated individuals, their best volunteers, their most knowledgeable experts, and they are... babysitting webpages that were already finished and really good. At EarthChronicle.com, we write a page once and save it. If new information comes up and we need to change it, then we make the changes and resave the webpage. But basically once it's done, we never have to worry about it again. We can move on to writing new articles about new topics. But at Wikipedia, EVERY DAY hard working volunteers are rechecking old pages because no page is ever finished. On Wikipedia, ANYONE can change it for any reason or purpose at any time. I cannot imagine the frustration this can cause Wikipedia's hard working experts. And while I respect them for their self-sacrifice, it seems ridiculous and unproductive to waste all that time.

6.

Check on Wikipedia for objectivity and other differences.