Jason Felch of Chasing Aphrodite has submitted an application to the Knight Foundation for assistance in creating WikiLoot – a website that will use crowd sourcing to create a database of looted artifacts in US museums. Of the project, Felch explains:
WikiLoot will be built upon an open-source platform (e.g. MediaWiki or Drupal), using semantic web and linked data technology. Tagging and analysis of the unstructured data in the archive will be crowd-sourced via an established and growing social media network of investigative reporters, academics, researchers and citizens combating the illicit antiquities trade…
It took European investigators nearly a decade to trace one hundred objects shown in records seized from black market dealers to the shelves of American museums. The result was an international controversy that exposed the connection between museums and the illicit antiquities trade. During six years of reporting on the topic, I obtained much of this archive, including images of thousands of looted antiquities that have yet to be located. WikiLoot will enlist the public to track down those objects, building a digital map of the illicit trade while raising awareness about the crisis of looting…
Cool idea, huh? The only way it would be effective is if many people elected to use the site, making it a primary place to go to perform checks for missing objects. On the flip side, purchasers of antiquities could help satisfy due diligence requirements by using the website as a place to search. doI wonder how will this site compare to or interact with the Art Loss Register.
View the Knights proposal: WikiLoot: crowd-sourcing an analysis of the black market in looted antiquities.
And who will keep WikiLoot from becoming another brown shirt organization prone to vigilante style witch hunts? If we are supposed to “trust” the integrity of radical archaeologists, we’re looking at a potential disaster. I think the idea of public support for recovery of stolen objects is certainly worth consideration. The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild actually volunteered such a project, fully funded, to the Afghan government as an aid to recovery of coins stolen from the Kabul Museum. Although Afghan cultural ministry representatives initially embraced the idea, bureaucrats and ideologues killed the discussion at higher levels. What makes WikiLoot better? The whole idea is fraught with dangers and the outcome is predictable. Looting will not be abated and innocent collectors and independent scholars will be dragged through the mud by archaeo-bloggers who are blinded by their own mirrors.
Hi Wayne!
I think the idea with the Wikis is that there is no centralized mechanism of control — the community-at-large “polices” other members. I hadn’t thought about it, but I bet some interesting debates could arise over the content of the WikiLoot pages. Perhaps this might be a good forum in which to have them, one at a time?
I understand your conclusion, but not the facts that bring you to it. Why couldn’t a crowd-sourcing approach to a looted artifacts database work? I would think it would actually help collectors, as they would have a singular, free place to check to see if they wanted to confirm they could purchase an item legitimately.
Kimberly
Thank you both for your thoughts on the project. I understand Wayne’s concerns, and agree with Kimberly’s comment on the nature of Wikis. Please join our open facebook group for WiliLoot, where we’re trying to hash out these very issues in a public forum.
You can find the group here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/254800707942016/
Jason