On 3/2/06, Nicholas Moreau beaubeaver@yahoo.co.uk 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.
Err, how would the elder find Wikipedia?
I think it's safe to say, at least for the time being, that most of our article writing will be done by people in countries that have access to modern libraries. If/when we start seeing any substantial amount of content added by people who cannot use published sources (but nevertheless have a decent Internet connection and a working knowledge of English), we can deal with possible exceptions to policy.
Kirill Lokshin