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