Further information about the WikiLoot project, from the Author’s website. Remember to visit the proposal details on the Knight Foundation’s website & express your support for it, by “liking” or commenting on it.

From:
Chasing Aphrodite

Introducing WikiLoot: Your Chance to Fight the Illicit Antiquities Trade
Posted on March 12, 2012 | 3 Comments

Today we’re pleased to announce — and to seek your help with — an exciting new project we’ve been tinkering with in private for some time. We’re calling it WikiLoot.

The idea behind WikiLoot is simple:

1. Create an open source web platform, or wiki, for the publication and analysis of a unique archive of primary source records and photographs documenting the illicit trade in looted antiquities.

2. Use social media and other tools to engage a broad network of contributors — experts, journalists, researchers, dilettantes and curious citizens — to collaborate in the analysis of that material.
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Jason Felch, one of the authors of Chasing Aphrodite, has submitted an application to the Knight Foundation, for assistance in creating WikiLoot – a website that would use crowd sourcing to create a database of looted artefacts in US museums.

Now – the suggestion is that it is only museums in the US, but others around the world are far from blameless in this issue & it ought to be easy to extend the remit of such a project to gradually include these too.

I think that the idea is an excellent one. I started trying to create a definitive list of artefacts disputes – just based on the articles I’ve posted on this site, but it is not a simple task – some cases have very little information available & each case is very different – so it is hard to come up with a simple way to categorise them all.

The key thing at this stage is to get funding for the project. In the words of the creator “One of the key things considered by judges is public engagement with the proposed idea. The best way to show this is for you to “like” our proposal or add a comment on how you think it could help — or be improved. (You may need to sign in with a Tumblr or other social media account.)” So, if this idea is of interest to you, make sure you go to the Knight Foundation page and “Like”, or ideally comment on the proposal. Remember also, to forward the details of the project to anyone else that you think may be interested in it, to try and get their support.

I look forward to being able to post further news about this project as it develops.

From:
Knight Foundation

WikiLoot: crowd-sourcing an analysis of the black market in looted antiquities

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]
WikiLoot will identify looted antiquities in American museums by crowd-sourcing the analysis of a unique archive seized from black market dealers.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]
A handful of researchers around the world have access to parts of the archive. None have tried a crowd-sourcing approach to locating the thousands of looted objects shown in it.
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