[WikiEN-l] Verifiability and Africa

[Fred Bauder]

Actually it keeps what you do dirty and unreliable. We have an  
article, "Damned knowledge" which partially addresses this question.  
Political and ethnic considerations should play a minimum role is  
what is considered knowledge. That is one reason I defended  
User:Deeceevoice so strongly (although she undoubtedly considers me  
her worst enemy). I continue to maintain that should a village elder  
(or high school student) in Africa manage somehow to get on-line and  
write an article about their village we should be happy to have the  
input. Consider our article about Bonanza, Colorado, a decrepit  
collection of shacks in a barren gully in Colorado, who if you would  
believe Wikipedia, has an per capita income of $66,857. If I should  
add information from my personal knowledge that the reason for this  
astounding statistic is that one of the fourteen souls who was  
counted in the 2000 census has a nice income, but while he does not  
live in the town, other than brief periods in the summer, maintains  
his legal residence there so that he and his friends can vote there,  
in one of the tiniest incorporated towns in the United States, I  
would be adding unverified information. If I went further and  
speculated that the reason for the struggle for control of the town  
government was related to hopes regarding legalized gambling, I might  
be even further out of line. Yes, the line must be drawn somewhere,  
but an image of this desolate wasteland might prove very  
illuminating, despite being very much original research.

Fred

On Mar 2, 2006, at 9:11 PM, Fastfission wrote:

> 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