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.
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. 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.)
And much of the information that does reach Wikipedia about Ethiopian history from that land appears to be reliable, when evaluated with common sense. For example, there's an editor Sendeq with whom I don't always agree & only rarely provides references for his material, but I have come to trust his contributions. On the other hand, a number of clan & ethnic rivalries are fought on Wikipedia from anonymous accounts with IP numbers, & are best dealt with as if vandalism.
The problem I'm facing at the moment with Ethiopian articles is that last November Meles Zenawi closed down the media in his country, following riots over the election results. (There's some disagreement over who started these riots: whether it the opposition parties who called for demonstrations or the police who were told to "keep order".) As a result, I'm finding that if I want to write adequately detailed articles, I'm faced with using unacceptible sources -- namely Weblogs & web forums. For every event that a reputable source like the BBC publishes, there are about 5 more that I end up learning about in other ways.
And conditions in Ethiopia are relatively peaceful compared to the rest of the continent. For some countries we have no reliable information because the people who might provide reports either can't get to the scene -- or are killed in the violence. Civil wars don't usually recognize neutral observers.
I don't know the answer to this problem, whether to ask for an exception in this case (& risk garbage being submitted because of this), or to simply not write about what I learn. It is a problem worth discussing, although I think few of the Wikipedians who struggle with this problem post or read the mailling list.
Geoff