Prof Dr Hermann Maurer
KOTA SAMARAHAN: While netizens across the globe find Wikipedia useful in many ways, an Austrian academic asserts that the free encyclopedia is not enough for retaining cultural heritage.
Prof Dr Hermann Maurer of Graz University of Technology said Wikipedia might have covered a variety of subjects, characters, and issues but did not necessarily come with rich information on local and regional culture.
As such, he said it was essential for a city, state or country to operate their respective regional servers to enhance the percentage of regional information.
For instance, he said Kuching was featured on Wikipedia and yet the page lacked certain information especially from a technical point for cultural heritage.
“Wikipedia covers Kuching but personally many things are missing. Graz is also on Malaysian Wikipedia but we do not get enough regional information from there,” he told the inaugural Borneo Heritage Symposium 2012 themed ‘Advanced Technologies for Digital Culture and Heritage Management’ at DeTAR Putra, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas) here yesterday.
Maurer pointed out that regional servers placed emphasis on local history, local culture, archives, forms of nature, personalities, cities and villages, to name a few.
Much of the information such as historical facts require no updates but needs to be captured and preserved, he said.
“There are many things we do not need to update every year. For example, Mount Kinabalu will not grow in size despite the number of years. All we have to do is repose it.”
Regional servers, he said, must have information structured into various collections and should be integrated.
“Everything has to be exciting to read, has to be packaged into nice stories. In addition, information should be pulled together from various sources semi-automatically.”
He added that information must be searchable by metadata and other criteria.
Be it Wikipedia or regional servers, Maurer stressed the pertinence of making the sources, either name of author or the archives it came from, known to users.
He said it was equally vital to preserve the preceding information during the process of updating.
“Updating is dangerous and considered harmful. It destroys previous information and hence history. We believe in the preservation of information.”
For example, he said when an old building was renovated, one could not experience what it was like earlier.
The 70-year-old then showed three pictures taken of the main theatre in Vienna in 1900, 1965 and 2000.
He stressed how important it was to preserve the past and the present of each country and region and to continue doing so.
“People today should know what was important in the region, say, 20, 30 or 100 years ago, and in 2050 people should know about the region in 2030.”
He added that this could be done using modern technology and information from various sources including existing organisations, archives, museums, libraries, publishers and by tying in to a community.
“The task is particularly pressing in times of rapid change.”
Maurer is an Austrian computer scientist, serving as Professor of Computer Science at the Graz University of Technology.
He has supervised over 40 dissertations, written more than 20 books and over 600 scientific articles.