On Fri, Jan 21, 2011 at 10:21 PM, Wjhonson wjhonson@aol.com wrote:
You are mistaking the problem. It's not that a piece of knowledge is not googleable. It's that a piece of knowledge is not published whatsoever.
Never published. Anywhere. At any time. Ever. That's quite a different animal.
All disapproval of the Fellowship process appointment in this case, I fully understand D. Gerard's (IMO, misworded) point and what Wjohnson's point is as well. If we intend for the WMF to actually spread free knowledge, these sort of documentaries are important. David's point would ring true with me about the "teen en.wp" admins (to paraphrase) if I assumed that they knew of the efforts since the fall of the Soviet Union to document Bulgarian folk songs and stories. I own a few field recordings and have followed the "west's" interest in this cultural documentation. I would expect a great proportion of this mailing list to know of these studies, because this isn't run of the mill editing that is discussed here.
The point is that financing a grant to document oral history is important. Ask American musicologists what we would do without Alan Lomax's recordings and the work of the Smithsonian in the 1920's and 1930's recording folk, jazz, and blues. Don't knock it until you try it.