View source for LGBT History Project talk:Editors Club

# Editors' Club — agenda item: Recollections & Oral History

*For the first meeting. Proposed as a standing priority, not a one-off.*

## The proposition

We start actively collecting personal recollections — first-person memories of LGBT life in the UK — and treat them as core content, sitting alongside the factual articles. The framework is built; what we need now is real people's memories.

## Why this matters (the case)

- **The factual article is no longer the hard part.** Anyone can now generate a competent, sourced wiki article in minutes with AI. That used to be the skill and the value of a project like ours. It isn't any more. If the wiki is only facts, it competes with every chatbot — and loses.
- **What cannot be generated is lived experience.** No tool can tell you what it felt like to walk into your first gay pub, to be near the Admiral Duncan that night, to argue for trans colleagues inside a bank at budget time. That is the scarce, irreplaceable thing — and it's exactly what makes an archive an archive rather than an encyclopedia.
- **It's also how we undo the erasure.** So much of our history — women's lives, trans lives, the scene, community organising — survives only as memory, because it was criminalised, hidden or ignored by the formal record. Recollections are the way we recover what no source ever captured. A "sources only" wiki quietly repeats that erasure.
- **This is our distinctive purpose in the AI era.** Not to host facts anyone can regenerate, but to hold the first-person testimony that no one can — curated, attributed, and vouched for by a real community.

## What's already in place

- A `{{Recollection}}` template — an attributed, clearly-labelled box, visually distinct from neutral article text.
- Editorial Policy §2.9 (v2.7) actively encourages recollections and sets the rules: attribution, consent, framing as testimony not fact, a light-touch on editing, and the one hard limit (no unsubstantiated allegations about living people).
- A working proof: the first recollection is live on the *LGB without T* page — the sourced fact and the lived detail, side by side. The model works.

## The ask — decisions for the meeting

1. **Agree recollections as a core, ongoing priority**, owned by the group, not a side feature.
2. **Lead by example:** each editor records one recollection of their own to seed the collection.
3. **Name the people to approach** — elders, founders, witnesses — and who around the table has the relationship to reach them.
4. **Agree a simple intake path:** how someone offers a memory, how consent is captured, who writes it up.
5. **A public "Share your memory" call** — on the wiki, on social, and at talks.

## The urgency

Oral history is the one kind of content with a deadline. The people who remember the 1970s and 80s scene, the founding of the early groups, and the AIDS years are ageing; every year, some of that memory is lost for good. This is not a "someday" project. The right time to start recording is the first meeting.