2011/7/27 David Richfield davidrichfield@gmail.com:
Lots of ethnographic work is very strongly based on interviews with people who have an oral tradition. This is then published and, quite correctly, cited in Wikipedia: the view is that it is then a secondary source, and hence appropriate. When we directly source oral interviews and host them on a sister project, the complaint is that this is a primary source: prone to small sample sizes, unscientific data gathering, and hidden biases on the part of the interviewers.
Some Wikinews reporters have introduced their interviews as sources on Wikipedia, with some success -- linking directly to an audio recording of the interview, not to the Wikinews story -- but there has been resistance to it.
I've often wondered why we don't introduce video and audio recordings to our articles, showing interviews by Wikipedians of notable primary sources. It would make our articles significantly more interesting and reader-friendly, and would tie in directly with efforts to record oral histories.
Sarah