[WikiEN-l] Verifiability and Africa

[Jimmy Wales]

Sometimes when I'm really really exhausted and tired of dealing with
copyright battles, AfD battles, userbox wars, and everything else, I
wonder if we've lost our way.

And then... I see post like this one from Fastfission and Nicholas
Moreau realize that no, we're very noisy and silly sometimes, but we are
far from losing our way.

This is exactly the kind of conversation and dialogue that makes
Wikipedia great. :)


Fastfission wrote:
> 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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