PikiWiki - a new Israeli Photo Wiki Project

In yesterday's Wikipedia Israel conference a new photo project was introduced. The PikiWiki Israel project is a photo site for personal pictures. In Israel over the years there were not as many agencies and media companies which documented the country. Even today there are many pictures from everyday life and from important events which come from individuals. I am sure this is true in many countries where the media does not cover the peripheral territory the way it is in Israel. In Israel there is a whole era from the 1880's to the 1940's which consisted of small settlements and no Jewish government. That era was documented by small organizations and at the time the Jewish settlement in Israel was one big experiment. Today the same is true with towns and people living far from the big cities. Besides the organized settlements (kibbutzim, villages, developments) there are still people who are "out there". This could turn out to be a very interesting project. So take a look at
http://www.pikiwiki.org.il/

source: pikiwiki.org.il -- source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PikiWiki_Israel_1112_hadera_%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA_%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA.jpg [link]

What I like about seeing photographs from individual's collection is how they see the world around them. Reporters and professional photographers tend to focus on and event or a place or a person. People who photograph their surrounding area seem to have their own interesting view of life. Sometimes it is just their family and town, still it is something that nobody else would bother photographing and keeping for future generations. PikiWiki.org.il is an Israeli site (in Hebrew for now) and it is limited in scope and capability. Hopefully just like WikiPedia has done for encyclopedic knowledge in individuals all over the world so will this project do for our individual images -> make them a more collective in nature.

Photographs are also the real record media of the last century. Before photography became popular people drew and wrote. But the camera changed the way we have been telling about our lives. The small camera was the first gadget. Before that men (especially, i.e. not women) had to do with other things. But the camera gave something for men to do, the first modern age hobby I guess. Since then we have had a steady flow of images from anything you can imagine. Once there are enough images on the site it will be interesting to see what we remember and what images are representative of historical events. Stay tuned and take a look...