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

[Yaroslav M. Blanter]

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On Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:28:31 +0100, Thomas Morton
<morton.thomas at googlemail.com> wrote:
> For what it is worth....
> 
> I think this approach exists on en.wiki on the premise that by using
> foreign
> sources with no independent translation available:
> 
> a) It makes it easier to push a POV or miss-interpretation via that
source
> (because other editors are generally not able to understand it)
> b) There is more potential for mistakes or miscomprehension - for
example
> if
> editors resort to using Google translate (not at all uncommon)
> 

Actually, I do not see much of a problem here.

I created more than 30 articles in English Wikipedia in the last three
months, and all but two only cite Russian sources. I believe for the topics
of these articles English (or, for that matter, in any other language than
Russian) sources do not exist. I was one approached and asked to check the
facts based on one of the sources (which I did and corrected the text of
the article. However, if someone asks me to provide a translated piece
proving one of the statements I will gladly do it (I believe the article
talk page is an appropriate place). In my opinion, providing a source in a
foreign language is not more OR than to provide just one source in a topic
where thousands of contradicting sources exist (the perennial example is
Israeli-Palestine conflict).

Cheers
Yaroslav