[WikiEN-l] Verifiability and Africa

[Geoffrey Burling]

On Thu, 2 Mar 2006, Nicholas Moreau wrote:

> Africa was brought up in discussion of verifiability. This raises an  important question, should/can we be lax references for African content  in en?
>
>  Suppose a tribes' elder writes an article on his village, he'll do it  based on oral history, or one-off documents. This information may be  recorded in books, but these books are stashed away in libraries miles  upon miles away.
>
>  What happens then? It's true information, but there's little or no available sources for the writer to cite.
>
Welcome to my challenge: writing articles about Ethiopia (& neighboring 
countries) where I can provide adequate sources. The short report on this 
challenge is that sometimes I'm successful, & sometimes I'm not; compared to 
a number of other topics one could write about for Wikipedia, verification 
is currently harder, & for the forseeable future will likely remain so.

The longer report on this challenge is as follows. The problem of 
"oral history" isn't as insurmountable as it might first appear: a large 
number of field researchers spent the 20th century combing Africa & 
recording oral historical traditions, so a lot of material that one might 
expect to find in an encyclopedia is in print, & can be verified. Getting 
ahold of the printed accounts might pose a challenge of one kind or 
another: for example, I own a copy of Richard Pankhurst's quite informative 
_Economic History of Ethiopia_ (which covers the years 1800-1935), but it 
had a first printing of 4,000 copies, so I don't know if someone else could 
easily verify any material I might draw from it. But that is a problem with 
every specialized discipline. (Anyone else on the list own a copy of 
_Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament_? It's another 
valuable work, but not one found in the average public library.)

And much of the information that does reach Wikipedia about Ethiopian history 
from that land appears to be reliable, when evaluated with common sense. 
For example, there's an editor Sendeq with whom I don't always agree & only 
rarely provides references for his material, but I have come to trust his 
contributions. On the other hand, a number of clan & ethnic rivalries are 
fought on Wikipedia from anonymous accounts with IP numbers, & are best 
dealt with as if vandalism.

The problem I'm facing at the moment with Ethiopian articles is that last 
November Meles Zenawi closed down the media in his country, following riots 
over the election results. (There's some disagreement over who started these 
riots: whether it the opposition parties who called for demonstrations 
or the police who were told to "keep order".) As a result, I'm finding that 
if I want to write adequately detailed articles, I'm faced with using 
unacceptible sources -- namely Weblogs & web forums. For every event that 
a reputable source like the BBC publishes, there are about 5 more that 
I end up learning about in other ways.

And conditions in Ethiopia are relatively peaceful compared to the rest of 
the continent. For some countries we have no reliable information because the 
people who might provide reports either can't get to the scene -- or are 
killed in the violence. Civil wars don't usually recognize neutral observers.

I don't know the answer to this problem, whether to ask for an exception in 
this case (& risk garbage being submitted because of this), or to simply 
not write about what I learn. It is a problem worth discussing, although I 
think few of the Wikipedians who struggle with this problem post or read 
the mailling list.

Geoff