Geoffrey Burling wrote:
On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Nicholas Moreau wrote:
Africa was brought up in discussion of
verifiability. This raises an important question, should/can we be lax references for
African content in en?
Suppose a tribes' elder writes an article on his village, he'll do it based on
oral history, or one-off documents. This information may be recorded in books, but these
books are stashed away in libraries miles upon miles away.
What happens then? It's true information, but there's little or no available
sources for the writer to cite.
Welcome to my challenge: writing articles about Ethiopia (& neighboring
countries) where I can provide adequate sources. The short report on this
challenge is that sometimes I'm successful, & sometimes I'm not; compared to
a number of other topics one could write about for Wikipedia, verification
is currently harder, & for the forseeable future will likely remain so.
Oral histories have a role to play. In Canada the Supreme Court has in
the past given credence to oral histories in establishing land claims of
the First Nations of British Columbia.
The longer report on this challenge is as follows. The
problem of
"oral history" isn't as insurmountable as it might first appear: a large
number of field researchers spent the 20th century combing Africa &
recording oral historical traditions, so a lot of material that one might
expect to find in an encyclopedia is in print, & can be verified. Getting
ahold of the printed accounts might pose a challenge of one kind or
another: for example, I own a copy of Richard Pankhurst's quite informative
_Economic History of Ethiopia_ (which covers the years 1800-1935), but it
had a first printing of 4,000 copies, so I don't know if someone else could
easily verify any material I might draw from it.
Hmmm! Published in Addis Abeba in 1968. (not exactly the best place to
publish if you want high circulation. :-) ) 4 copies available through
Abebooks, with the cheapest at US$59.37. The pre-1800 volume was
published in London and can be had for $14.31
But that is a problem with
every specialized discipline. (Anyone else on the list own a copy of
_Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament_? It's another
valuable work, but not one found in the average public library.)
32 copies available through Abebooks with the cheapest being for US$75.00
The point for me is that these are easy to track down, and I'm confident
that I could verify the material if I took an interest in the subject.
Ec