[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

Thu Feb 23 18:29:57 UTC 2012

On Thursday 23 February 2012 01:10 AM, Thomas Morton wrote:
> Splitting this off, Achal, I hope that's OK :)
>
> There's a discussion on at the reliable sources notice board, for instance,
>> which highlights some of the interpretive problems you raise:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/**
>> Noticeboard#Oral_Citations<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Citations>
>
> Thanks for the pointer there; I'll try and place some comments in there
> later. It is certainly an interesting discussion.
>
> But here are some initial thoughts (please bear in mind I have only scanned
> that discussion, and whilst I have had an ongoing interest in the oral
> citations project I never dug into in too much depth). Also remember this
> is based on my interpretation of our policies, so others may well differ!
>
>
>> Can I ask you how you would analyse the work of the oral citations project
>> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Research:Oral_Citations<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations>)
>> in terms of our policies on original research, and verifiability?
>>
> The best way I can address this is to lay out my thoughts on our sourcing
> policy.
>
> Material on Wikipedia can be divided into "fact" and "opinion". The latter
> of these is, perhaps confusingly, the simplest to address; because opinion,
> viewpoints and perception can quite easily be collated and summarised. The
> only real difficulty exists in figuring out which opinions are noteworthy
> to record.
>
> The problem is facts; as I am sure everyone can appreciate, facts are very
> easy to get wrong (maliciously or not). This is especially a problem in
> History where events can be pieced together via all manner of sources. Even
> WW2 history can differ dramatically depending on the accounts you read -
> some overuse oral citation (humans are fallible) and others misuse official
> records (which can range from faked through to inaccurate).
>
> The problem with primary sourcing of the oral form is that it comes
> directly from an individual - with all of their perceptions and biases. To
> make an extreme example out of this; imagine taking an oral citation from
> Hitler, and a Jew in a concentration camp. Such citations would, I imagine,
> give radically different viewpoints of the Holocaust. Obviously other
> accounts, by third parties, show us which account is accurate - but if we
> had only those two viewpoints I hope it is obvious how
> difficult separating fact and fiction could be (ignoring that any rational
> person would see the obvious).

Of course. So, for the oral citations project, we specifically chose 
topics that are in the present, that are seen and done by thousands of 
people (i.e. not obscure), and that are also as uncontroversial as 
possible. Examples: village games, temple rituals, recipes.

>
> So that brings us to the ideas behind sourcing; which is that we should
> consider not only the material but author and publisher. This is important
> because if the author of the source is partisan to the material then you
> have to consider they may be biased to their viewpoint. As less extreme
> example might be two citations from a Republican and a Democrat. Both say
> "My Party is the Best because our policies are..." - you can't use either
> source to say one party is better, because they are partisan. But you could
> use it to relate their parties policies; and as partisans they are well
> positioned to relate those policies!
>
> If the author is a third party, of course, that lends weight to their
> material.
>
> The publisher is the stumbling block in this case; because it is a
> non-expert [sic] researcher uploading material to Commons. What could
> mitigate this is a detailed description of the methodology used to collect
> the citations, which would allow editors to review it for problems.
>
> One final thing to consider is that WP:V talks about controversial or
> challenged material. Whilst that might be a risk policy on the face (it
> would be easy to present something non-controversial but also not true as
> fact) it's critical to letting us actually write article (otherwise we
> would be stifled in citations :)). For example; I've sourced material to
> personal sites before with minimal problems - sometimes it is questioned
> and what I usually say is "If you can show someone saying the opposite, or
> make a sensible argument against, then lets remove it". (FWIW, and this is
> an aside, I think is relaxed form to building articles is a Good Thing, and
> we should do it more often - worrying about being wrong is stifling).
>
> So now I've picked it apart here is my thinking; Oral citations on Commons
> could be excellent sources in the right context.

:)

>
> Sure if the material is disputed or otherwise problematic then it is better
> to look for a source that has peer review. But for simplistic, factual
> things then I think it is rock solid. One example that comes to mind (and I
> don't know if the Oral citations covers this sort of thing) is this: I was
> recently on holiday in New Zealand. They have excellent museums there,
> fanatically maintained (which is amazing compared to most countries...).
> One nice feature is that a lot of the Mauri history exhibits have audio
> from those of Mauri ancestory describing some cultural fact or other.
> Things like recipes.

Yes, we encountered exactly this. When looking for aspects of everyday 
life that people both widely knew about and did in India and South 
Africa, but were also undocumented in scholarship or even print, 
everything we had came back to 'culture'.

> Something like that is an excellent oral citation; the author is
> authoritative (being Mauri) and the content uncontroversial.
>
> Boiled down, I think that oral citations have a distinct place as a source
> - and we should encourage people to consider them as sources when writing.
> But they are not something you could, for example, base an entire article
> around. We should also explore ways to make them more "reliable", and more
> usable. For example making them obviously available to experts in the field
> they cover.

I agree that an article wholly based on oral citations is less desirable 
than an article that mixes traditional and non-traditional sources. Two 
things here though: (a) There are actually a pretty large number of 
things that are both widely known and done and not documented in print, 
so this is a real problem; and in these cases, having articles solely 
based on oral citations could still be useful, akin to a stub, awaiting 
further refinement. (b) Though this is not directly related to the 
conversation, it does relate to earlier points made by Sarah and you 
regarding primary sources. It is sometimes hard to separate fact from 
opinion within the oral citation - which is to say, X person's fact may 
be Y person's opinion, etc. - and in my opinion, even the cleanest set 
of facts gleamed from an oral citation will contain some perspective or 
opinion. I don't see that as a problem (and this is regardless of how it 
would parse through the OR policy) as long as the perspective is 
attributed as just that, or even challenged. We encountered this, and 
recorded it - in articles on village games in Limpopo in South Africa. 
The older ladies we spoke to said young people didn't play the games 
they had just shown us, and the young people we spoke to said they did, 
but with a slightly different template, and we recorded and reported it 
exactly as said, as two conflicting perspectives. (Would that be a 
responsible use of primary sources? I think so.)

>
> It *is* important to get secondary coverage of a topic, because we are
> tertiary source. This is the core idea of our primary source policy; if we
> utilise primary material and research something to the extent that we are
> the main authoritative source that becomes *hugely* problematic!
>
> And further, how these policies might apply to the idea of social media, as
>> well as more private archives, say, corporate archives, being used as
>> citations? (And on that point, is there a difference between the the Native
>> American folk archive at the Smithsonian and the corporate archives of the
>> Michelin corporation in France, for our purposes?)
>>
> Corporate archives I would deal with in the same way as any primary source;
> use it to cite facts, bear in mind the author/publisher. WP:SPS talks about
> being wary of unduly self-serving material, and I think that is an
> excellent way of putting the approach to corporate archives.

I had an interesting discussion on this with Florence and Christophe, so 
I'll share this with them if they miss it here. My own first instinct is 
to trust a self-avowedly 'neutral' source (like the Smithsonian) more 
than a corporation (like Michelin) but for our purposes, it doesn't seem 
to make much sense to treat them any differently.

>
> In terms of social media, this is tricky. Because social media is vastly
> more accessible than other mediums - particularly to hacks. Wordpress blogs
> are trivial to make, for example, and you can sound authoritative or
> convincing on a subject to a layman with only medium effort. I'd treat
> these with more caution.
>
> Phew, that was dumped out in a stream of conciousness way - so it might be
> a bit "buggy". But that's what I figure :)
>
> Tom
>
> (Just as a note; I consider "publisher" quite broadly - i.e. the person who
> hosts or maintains the material)
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