[Foundation-l] Questions about new Fellow

[David Gerard]

On 20 January 2011 11:00, Achal Prabhala <aprabhala at gmail.com> wrote:

> Now to the project. I see that neither of you gentlemen has any thoughts
> on it, and I welcome your engagement. The problem with oral knowledge
> vs. published knowledge is an old one, and there are many interesting
> ways in which the sum of published material in the world reflects the
> order of the world. For us, unfortunately, it also means that in some
> cases, to make Wikipedias work in languages where scholarly publishing
> is not that strong is a difficult task. This problem applies not just to
> languages with a primarily oral tradition (such as many of those in
> circulation in sub-Saharan Africa today) but also for those with a
> non-Latin written tradition but with a lower output of published
> material (like many South Asian languages today). What excites me about
> this is that I am interested in the idea of 'legitimate' knowledge - and
> the manner in which our ideas of authenticity, reliability and
> certification can be shaped and changed in our own lifetimes. This
> spirit of consistent reinvention, I think, is central to the idea of
> Wikipedia and everything else that comes under the umbrella of our movement.


This will be *fantastic*.

English Wikipedia's verifiability rules start from a simple good idea
but have accreted into a disastrous mess in many ways, even for things
that there are in fact documentation for. They're ideally suited to
history (mostly written), science (mostly written) or current affairs
(mostly written), but are disastrously awful even in the Western world
for the arts, for example. There's a lot of knowledge in fields which
everyone assumes, and which are transmitted academically, but not in a
format that teenage en:wp admins can grasp in five seconds.

It's exactly like having to compress the knowledge of ontologies and
weighing of evidence that people do four-year degrees to learn, into
three or four paragraphs.

Progress in the areas of how to write about oral knowledge will help
with the vast spectrum of knowledge between oral knowledge and
academic writing.


- d.