Thanks to enshittification and cracking down on pirating, it will become more and more difficult to find reliable info online. I’d like a community where people volunteer to fulfill simple research requests from other users using their own privately-held sources, maybe providing a few PDF pages for verification.
E.g., someone could make a post asking “What kind of currency did the Merovingians use?” And I, a historian, could provide them with a short, scholarly excerpt that answers the question.
Yes, I do think the mainstream internet will get that shitty.
Right, but I’m thinking less “experts weighing in” and more “havers of info sharing it.” I only (but perhaps confusingly) used the history example because most people won’t have that info lying around.
Generally they didn’t -it was a barter economy- but there were two exceptions. The first is the Roman solidus, a thin gold coin about the size of a US quarter, but those show up mostly in the context of extravagant royal transactions (“and king Childebert gave 6,000 solidi to the monastery of St. Martin,” that sort of thing). The second are various small copper and silver coins minted locally but in very small quantities. I’m not sure if there is a consensus as to whether they were genuine currency or mostly tokenistic.
Thank you for the answer! Is there a lemmy community to discuss these things? Om Reddit there are /r/Francish and other historical subreddits, but I’m new on lemmy and have not figured everything out yet I think.
Forgive me if I’m ignorant of something, but how would it be different from Wikipedia? Crowd-sourced information, cited and reviewed by peers? It has flaws, but no more than a Lemmy community would have.
Interestingly the Merovingian dynasty wiki page does have info on coinage but doesn’t mention the barter economy you describe so you might be able to contribute there if you’ve got the sources to back it up.
Yeah, the coin example was a terrible one, because both r/AskHistorians and wikipedia answer those kinds of questions really well. Just take the basic concept and extend it to, well, anything, especially fairly specific questions that wikipedia wouldn’t answer. Wikipedia can’t have everything, and other sources will become rarer and rarer.
Thanks to enshittification and cracking down on pirating, it will become more and more difficult to find reliable info online. I’d like a community where people volunteer to fulfill simple research requests from other users using their own privately-held sources, maybe providing a few PDF pages for verification.
E.g., someone could make a post asking “What kind of currency did the Merovingians use?” And I, a historian, could provide them with a short, scholarly excerpt that answers the question.
Yes, I do think the mainstream internet will get that shitty.
/r/AskHistorians had (ok, still has) such a standard. would be amazing to see more of that
Right, but I’m thinking less “experts weighing in” and more “havers of info sharing it.” I only (but perhaps confusingly) used the history example because most people won’t have that info lying around.
So, what currency did the Merovingians use? Really I want to know. What coins did Charles Martel have in his purse?
Generally they didn’t -it was a barter economy- but there were two exceptions. The first is the Roman solidus, a thin gold coin about the size of a US quarter, but those show up mostly in the context of extravagant royal transactions (“and king Childebert gave 6,000 solidi to the monastery of St. Martin,” that sort of thing). The second are various small copper and silver coins minted locally but in very small quantities. I’m not sure if there is a consensus as to whether they were genuine currency or mostly tokenistic.
Thank you for the answer! Is there a lemmy community to discuss these things? Om Reddit there are /r/Francish and other historical subreddits, but I’m new on lemmy and have not figured everything out yet I think.
I don’t know, sorry, it’s been a while I used reddit myself.
Forgive me if I’m ignorant of something, but how would it be different from Wikipedia? Crowd-sourced information, cited and reviewed by peers? It has flaws, but no more than a Lemmy community would have.
Interestingly the Merovingian dynasty wiki page does have info on coinage but doesn’t mention the barter economy you describe so you might be able to contribute there if you’ve got the sources to back it up.
Yeah, the coin example was a terrible one, because both r/AskHistorians and wikipedia answer those kinds of questions really well. Just take the basic concept and extend it to, well, anything, especially fairly specific questions that wikipedia wouldn’t answer. Wikipedia can’t have everything, and other sources will become rarer and rarer.