[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, , Britannica to stop printing books

[Robin McCain]

On 3/15/2012 3:10 AM, foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
> Local events in western countries are pretty easy to cover within
> wikipedia's rules. A mix of local news and the local history mob
> usually sees that there are plenty of sources.
>
> On the other hand writing about Odek (Joseph Kony's home village) is
> pretty much impossible.
In that specific case you'd need a team of archeologists and war crimes 
investigators to collect raw data and analyze it.

How much of this general lack of published information is due to local 
government policies (past or present) or destruction of records and how 
much is related to a recent conversion from oral history to written 
documents?

The willful suppression or destruction of historical records is one 
thing, lack of recordkeeping another.

It is pretty obvious that recording of history must start somewhere. 
Even though that recording might not meet the WP standards for 2nd or 
3rd layer analysis of 1st layer eyewitness accounts it still has value.

Is there a WMF project to get this process of historical bootstrapping 
started in such locations? If not, perhaps we need to tie into another 
organization that is already working on this...