[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

[Ziko van Dijk]

Yes Ting, and for these cases there is the method of [[oral history]].
This is a means to create what the Anglosaxons call "primary sources".
It is recorded and can later be used by a scholar (historian,
ethnologist etc.) for his research, for his "secondary sources".
These, with their scholar reflections, can be used by an encyclopedia.

There are good reasons for this way. One is, that it is not very
practical to cite from audiotapes/audiofiles. Another, that what this
individual is describing may be true for his personal environment but
cannot be generalized to others. For that, one needs the scholar.
Remember: witnesses are the most unreliable source ever. People tell
you plain nonsense - not because they want to ly or are stupid but
because the human brain is simply not created to be a historian. It
has the greatest difficulties to store information truthfully. So you
need to record, and compare the different assertions from different
people.

It is a possibility to record oral and visual expressions from
illiterates, and only later to do something with it scholarly. But all
this has nothing to do with Wikipedia.

Kind regards
Ziko



2012/2/25 Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de>:
> Mountain, the first ever editor on zh-wp, and still active until today, told
> me the following story one day (it was before the Oral Citation project but
> I remembered the story very well):
>
> He came from the coast of Shandong, and his father told him that earlier
> there was a local tradition where people went early morning to the coast to
> catch crabs or mollusks (one of them). They used to use a special technique
> to catch the animals. But meanwhile no one is using this technique anymore,
> not only because there are now plenty of crabs or mollusks on the market
> from the hydroculture, but also because the coast which was wild earlier are
> now all urbanized, with oil terminals and harbors and those. When Mountain
> told me that story he felt he would like to write down those stories because
> in maybe 10 or 20 years, latest in 50 years, no one would ever know that
> there was such a thing on the world. And that tradition would be lost for
> ever. But he also felt he could not write them on Wikipedia because he had
> no resources, because until now no of the ethmologists ever had interested
> on such traditions and no academic resources ever mentioned it. With the
> Oral Citations Sourcing it would be possible to interview the old people or
> even let them show how the techniques worked.
>
> Greetings
> Ting
>
> On 25.02.2012 09:02, wrote Lodewijk:
>
>> Hi Castelo,
>>
>> just to make the discussion clearer: could you just give say 5 or 10
>> examples of topics where you believe oral citations are unavoidable? Then
>> I
>> hope that Ziko in his turn can explain how we can write about those
>> examples without using them.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Lodewijk
>>
>
>
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Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
http://wmnederland.nl/
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