[Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge

[Wjhonson]

David how is an exact quote a summary or interpretation?
An exact quote, backed up by the actual audio track is... exact.
You are not summarizing it, and you are not interpreting it either.
You are presenting it.






-----Original Message-----
From: David Goodman <dggenwp at gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wed, Jul 27, 2011 12:39 pm
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge


On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Wjhonson <wjhonson at aol.com> wrote:

 For actual quotations from sources, you should quote the source exactly.
 Then you will never be using original research.

 You are going the next step and summarizing and interpreting.  Don't do that.
But selecting what quotations to use, what parts of them to use, and
n what context one uses them, and the language one uses to present
hem, is a not a mechanical or necessarily neutral endeavor. It cannot
e done without summarizing and interpreting.
Certainly in Wikipedia and everywhere else the world also,
nrepresentative of partial quotations are used to propagandistic or
ontroversial effect--sometimes even deliberately, but more often
ecause the particular quotation and manner fits what the editor
esires to express. A person in the course of a long career will say
any things on their main interests, and some will be  at  least
artially contradictory. Selecting what represents the person's true
iews, what represents a true change of opinion, what represent
rratic misstatements --all of this require decisions which amount to
hat we call original research and synthesis. It is not possible to
rite any but the most trivial article without research and synthesis.
reparing a summary of the state of a question intrinsically requires
t. Deciding of the balance of an article necessarily involves having
 POV--if one approaches a subject where one has none initially, by
he time the article has been finished, one or the other position is
ure to have been found more appealing, and a non-neural POV is sure
o have developed.
The writing of secondary and tertiary works   are inevitably
ssociated with bias.  The way by which we avoid its worst
anifestations in Wikipedia is not by being free from bias, but by
aving articles written collectively by a diverse group of people.
hat we lose in elegant prose we gain in objectivity. This is why it
s important to  continually increase the number of active
ditors--not just to increase the scope, but to ensure adequate eyes
n the articles.
But even so, the different Wikipedias will be inevitably different.
Attention has recently been called on the  list to
ttp://manypedia.com/.)  We need in particular more people with
ultiple language ability to incorporate the diversity in the
ndividual encyclopedias.    This is one reason why it is critically
mportant to develop Wikipedias in the non-Western languages, so their
iews too can be represented not just in their own language, but
hroughout the project.
 --
avid Goodman
DGG at the enWP
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DGG
ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
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