They're not "free". Wikipedia is funded by donations.

Many historians would willingly make their work available "for free" in exchange for donations.

Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45. It’s a long read, but its extremely interesting insight in to Hitler. For any one interested in WW2 I’d highly recommend it.

Why do you believe a centralized, privately run, non-profit is any less at risk of the same short comings you just listed? At least with a government program it would take an act of law to drop instead of just a private entity pulling the plugs

Which tax money do you believe funded this?

While not helpful in this particular instance, this website gives access to a lot of books that are out of print with copyright expired: https://www.gutenberg.org

So if there are Victorian-era books or autobiographies you’re looking for, you’ll likely find it here for free. Muriel Gardiner’s book unfortunately might need a decade or three before the copyright is expired. (Timing depends on country of the author. Usually 70ish years after death of author.)

Tax money went into the research. Now a commercial publisher wants your money as well.

I agree with your idea but not all government have:

-desires or duty to allow their people to access information (education and science funding is usually a left wing value);

-budgets or dedicated political bodies for research, science, education that can afford it;

-a long lasting policy of open and accessible information, even accessible to foreign internet users (bandwidth costs money and why use tax money from your country to allow people abroad who don’t pay taxes to use the information?)

-consistent political views on the same topics, depending on the succession of different rulers (a new ruler in place could decide to shut down servers dedicated to science if that doesn’t fit their politics);

Etc. Ideally, it would be possible. But the fickle nature of digital information makes me wonder if publishing important papers on physical supports (no-DRM, I mean paper…) is still the most reliable and persistent way of preserving and sharing it.

Except my recommendation was not everyone own their own website. It was governments creating and preserving things as a social works. Why do you want the responsibility to fall on individuals instead of the bodies that represent everyone?

Not to mention the proposal for Italians gaining citizenship coming up, all non Roman's being evicted from Rome, and the proposal getting axed as part of political compromises occurred about three or four times in a century leaving Italians feeling jerked around.

But that’s how it starts. Once something is hosted, people have access to it and can work on translating it collaboratively. If 100% of all medical research was posted online and easily accessible, language barrier would not be as much of an issue as you think

My suggestion to crowd source was regarding the financing of the translation and hosting.

That could be a type of Kickstarter project that would say “we are $… away from being able to make this document fully translated and accessible for free and on the public domain for the next hundred years”.

I know it sounds counterintuitive to say that in order for something to be free to access on the Internet people have to pay, but those things would get financed very quickly and benefit a great number of people for many years.

Again, that is how Wikipedia works… and centralizing information on a famous website like Wikipedia would be a much better solution than everybody who owns important documents creating their own type of website and their own type of subscription plan and their own type of paywall…

Again, if it's not law and backed by the world's governments it could vanish from support at any moment. But I agree those such efforts are worth while in the current here and now of our reality.

That’s an amazing story. I’d like to read her autobiography, but it seems to be out of print, and copies are expensive.

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This is where fediverse apps come in and could play a key role in how distributed information on the web works in the future. Look into a few of these. There are communities for scientific research specifically as well

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Hosting digital versions of things isn't the same as digitizing and/or translating them.

How do employers paying the employees get money with which to pay them in your model?

There is a large portion of people that its very hard to tell, because not many people would be openly LGBT and claims to be part of LGBT was easily used to discredit/disparage someone (e.g. roman emperor Elagabalus and claims of him being trans). However there are much more clear example for the poet Sappho and prussian king Frederick the Great.

Has anyone got any good recommendations for a narrative history of the Dutch Golden Age? Ideally one that covers both politics and culture.

First off a request - I've recently been watching the Babylon Berlin TV series set in Berlin just before the Great Depression, and I really liked it. So does anyone have any suggestions on Weimar Germany or the Weimar republic, preferably not focusing too much on the Nazis.

Anyway managed to get 2 books finished but both were short (reviews are copied and pasted) -

Finished Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas by David Runciman

>3.5/5 going to be a bit harsh and round down for Goodreads. I got a hardcover new on clearance for £5 and for that I am happy with it. Maybe worth a read if you can find a reasonably priced copy but not a must read.

>The book is 260 pages long and summarises/explains the author's interpretation of 12 important thinkers and their works. The main theme the book focuses on is the idea of the state and state control. In terms of scope the book begins with Hobbes' 'Leviathan' and ends with Fukuyama's 'The End of History'. Each chapter has a brief biography of the individiual and explains the historical context they were writing in, then explains their ideas and ends with a bit on how this applies to the 21st century (mainly COVID related). Of the 12 works chosen there are two anti-colonial works (Gandhi and his 'Hind Swaraj' and Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth', I found Fanon more interesting) and two feminist ones (Wollstonecraft's 'Vindication of the Rights of Women' which was an interesting chapter and Catherine MacKinnon's 'Towards of a Feminist Theory of the State' which I found rather boring). The rest of the book is mainly political thinkers like Arendt, Weber, Tocqueville etc. At the end of the book there is a further reading section for each chapter which always includes a watch/listen like lectures on Youtube or podcasts as well as books.

>Personally I enjoyed the chapters on Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Tocqueville, Marx and Weber the most.

>To me the author's interpretations seemed fine but I am very much an amateur on the subject. I haven't listened to the author's Talking Politics podcast this book was based on and apart from Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto I haven't actually read any of the works mentioned. So I am basically assuming the author's takes are reasonable rather than knowing for certain.

A Brief History of The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel Jones. I think for ebooks it is called Hitler Heralds.

>4/5 Worth reading if interested in immediate post-WWI Germany and definitely worth reading if you are interested in the Freikorps or the German rightwing paramilitary groups after WWI as there doesn't seem to be much else in English.

>The book is short at 280 or so pages and mainly covers the period from the end of the First World War to the failure of Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. The book is fairly easy to read in my opinion and doesn't feel like it needs much background knowledge. Despite the name of the book the Nazis don't really get mentioned till the last chapter (my guess is publishing gimmick as including Nazis and swastikas on the cover would boost sales). The topics that are included are the formation of the Freikorps, their use by the SPD government to fight the far left, the anti-government activities of the Freikorps (the Kapp Putsch gets a good chapter) and the nationalists and the political violence and murder campaigns once the large scale fighting had stopped. The book then ends with a relatively large (but still good) chapter on Hitler's rise to prominence in Bavaria and his attempted coup at the end of 1923. The author is sympathetic to the left (fair enough considering the subject) and does often point out the blatant bias of the authorities on behalf of the right, for example the average sentence for a leftwing political murderer was 15 years, for a rightwing murderer it was 4 months. Or that out of 354 rightwing political murders, 326 went unpunished. There are two appendices - the first is a list of all the main Freikorps, their leaders, size, dates of operation, eventual fate and any symbols. The second a biographical list of any Freikorp member who eventually became prominent within Nazi Germany or who had a major falling out with the Nazis.

>My main complaint is that the Freikorps' Baltic Campaign - offering to help the new Latvian and Estonian governments against the Bolsheivks then trying to turn these areas into German colonies, was only covered in one brief chapter. I wanted more about that topic. Additionally I felt that sometimes the more military focused bits felt like just lists of names and units.

>There is a decent further reading list but this is a book that originally came out in 1987 and was republished in 2003 so all of the books mentioned will be rather old and possibly out of date researchwise.

I'm now reading The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett about an Italian proto-fascist poet who captured the city of Fiume (Rijelka) and turned it into an independent city state because he was upset about the amount of territory Italy was going to get from the post-WWI peace negotiations. Personally I have mixed feelings about the book so far, it's not bad but I'm about halfway through it (300 pages or so) and it is just about his literary work (fair enough for a biography of a poet), his financial difficulties and who he was sleeping with - it hasn't even gotten to the beginning of WWI yet and rather little on politics so far.

Heard about the book on this podcast which is probably the better choice than reading the book as it gets to the key points -

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/194-the-first-fascist/id1537788786?i=1000565720363

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That’s literally what they do. The most important public domain texts in History are hosted there for anyone to access them freely (which is what the Internet should be…)

As far as I know, those websites don't offer a service where you just give them a manuscript and they do the work of digitizing it and/or translating it. And if they did, I doubt anybody would use it for important texts like this codex. Digitization and translation are significant expenses.

Ok pay the employees you don’t need to paywall things. Your just falling for the bait of why these things need to monetized