[WikiEN-l] Verifiability and Africa

[Fastfission]

This kind of stuff is actually a big concern within studies about the
writing of history (historiography) and the philosophy and sociology
of science -- what kinds of sources become part of "the archive", what
sorts of systemic biases are imposed by certain "standards of rigor",
how demarcation boundaries are really ways of imposing certain
"regimes of truth", and so forth.

In the end, though, being "an encyclopedia" already probably commits
us to certain epistemological programs over others. We can try to
lessen that where possible -- orals sources, can, for example, be
transcribed -- and try not to flaunt our biases, but we should not
feel unimpeded to draw the line somewhere.

The philosopher Paul Feyerabend was known for arguing that the
scientific method, as a method, was by definitive restrictive to what
sorts of knowledge could be integrated into the scientific corpus. He
was right, but I think he erred when he implied that this was not, in
fact, the entire point of having a scientific method: it's a
necessarily non-holistic form of knowledge, but it is reliable form of
knowledge. You trade away some of your possibilities, but you get
reliability and robustness in return.

I think it is an apt analogy in this case as well. A verfiability
policy of our sort might lose the elders, but it keeps what we do
include clean.

FF


On 3/2/06, Nicholas Moreau <beaubeaver at yahoo.co.uk> 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.
>
>   Nick/Zanimum
>
>
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