[WikiEN-l] Verifiability and Africa

[Stan Shebs]

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.
>
We're nowhere near that level of detail on Africa however. Check out the
"Historical Dictionary" series of books on African countries - typically
we have just 3-4% coverage of the topics listed in each of those, and
the dictionaries include bibliographies listing another thousand or more
works. We have many years of effort ahead just working from what's
already in print, and already sitting in the average university library.

(A sobering exercise actually - go into university library, pick a
book completely at random, see if we have articles adequately covering
the subjects in the book. We're missing a lot of stuff...)

Stan