I think that's a good question David. So much information about the past has been lost because nothing was ever committed to writing...or if they were, such written notes have been lost to time and never digitized and archived on the web.
For example, I am currently interested in learning more about a fellow named Len Butt from Australia, who is mainly known for his work with Cycads before he died in the early 1990s. He also created several Meco hybrids that now circulate in trade, but whose history and origin are unknown. Everything after awhile becomes hearsay and rumor, and rumors slowly are treated as truth.
On a slight tangent, I should also like to point out that CURRENT information needs to be committed to permanent or semi-permanent storage for future researchers, and I don't mean on facebook (for example, you'll notice data on FB disappears after a few years, and of course is never archived by archival entities such as
archive.org). There used to be a large number of hobbyist sites that focused on specific topics, but these seem to be replaced more and more now by group pages on social media, which i consider to be storage of transient information given again that the data is lost after a few years (and that copyright to such data is also unclear).
So in addition to "social" websites, we need more people like Steve Lucas who actually created something more permanent. He was a fellow meco guy who used to have a very good website called the Exotic Rainforest, which became a storehouse of very useful botanical information, as well as information that I would consider historical. Steve passed away unfortunately, but his website was fully archived and will hopefully continue in future to serve as a storehouse of data for future reference.
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