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 `
` 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.