Technically all eemadges are quotes —a quote defined as just a text fragment— but there is another sense of quote that has become all too familiar in the web: a quote as an inspirational, meaningful (and often cheesy) passage. It is in this sense that eemadges and quotes are clearly not the same thing: an eemadge is, first and foremost, a beautiful description.

All this does not mean that eemadges should be devoid of meaning, truth, or wisdom (or even cheesiness). What I'm trying to say here is that they are simply not what we are mainly looking for in them.

Image-links are special links inside the body of an eemadge that take you straight to an image search. They offer a different and strangely compelling way to read an eemadge. Here are some good examples.

These links, though, have to be manually implemented —a lengthy and nontrivial job: you need to be part curator, part google whacker.

There are several reasons I chose to make all the eemadges editable:

1. Because of image-linking: The main problem with image-linking, as I said before, is that it isn't easily automatable. It requires patience, time, and dedication and I hope that others will help me with it (I've image-linked only about a quarter of the eemadges).
2. To easily correct typos and gather missing meta-information: For instance, I have some eemadges (like this one) from the Spanish edition of an Italian book, Gog by Giovanni Papini, that I haven't been able to locate trough the Internet. I'd be very pleased if someday someone with the Italian copy shared the original version.
3. For collective translations: Out of necessity, I had to do several translations myself (here's an example) and by no means am I a professional translator — besides, English is my second language. I tried to do a good job myself, but I believe that together we will end up with better translations.
4. Because it should be able to outgrow me: I'm planning for lots of growth in this website and if such a time comes, I may have too much new submissions to check by myself. By then I hope to have other people at my side as editors.
5. For the spirit of cooperation that wikis foster: I would like to have not only a huge collection of descriptions, but rather a huge community of people sharing descriptions.

In the end, it comes down to the belief that if you want a community you have to allow people to contribute and share responsibilities with them.

Not really. I believe Wikipedia (with 800,000+ articles in the english version) has served as a very important proof of the the reliability and scalability (not to mention the spirit of cooperation and sense of community it fosters) of the wiki model.

Besides, I've tried to replicate some of the well-known systems that keep vandalism in check or limit it's damage. There is a list of the recent revisions and every change is recorded and can be easily undone.

Of course, things could unfold differently here and after reaching a certain milestone (in eemadges or people), vandalism (and inaccuracy) could become important concerns, calling for more control and constraints; that may as well be, but we'll cross that bridge when the time comes.

Sorry, but no—eemadges is not an outlet for original writing, it's a compilation of extracts from previously published material. If it were otherwise, we believe its content would quickly become contrived, un-spontaneous.