[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Andre Engels]

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 8:17 AM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> This is an interesting point.  In some ways Wikipedia has so fetishised
> reliability that there isn't much room for oral histories and memoirs.
> We can contact and communicate with each other by electronic means far
> more efficiently than ever.  The victim has been that long informative
> letters and diaries have become a thing of the past.  When that happens
> who becomes custodian of those memories? When we begin to rely entirely
> on published sources we become so much more dependent on some kind of
> official record. When we reject the memories of those who were there as
> insufficiently substantiated where do those memories go? The old foot
> soldier who attended the big battle was never much about book learnin'.
> The experience may have been too painful to remember and talk about
> before, and finally in his 90s after much prompting from his
> great-grandson he gives his only narrative, which his grandson duly
> records on inferior equipment. I'm sure we should be able to find a
> better response than, "Sorry, this is not a reliable source."
>
> The narrative may be flawed and biased.  Similar narratives by others
> who were there may be flawed and biased too, but each in its own way.
> There are no news reporters there when the men of a community decide to
> get together to build a playground or other needed community facility.
> Is their experience so unreliable? How do we describe the episteme of
> today's world without falling into gnosis?
>

Even if we would allow such as a resource, doing so would hardly do justice
to these reports. It would be possible to get one or two facts from such a
report, and I think it should be possible to do so, but publishing the
report either as a whole or in a complete summary would be problematic both
from a "No Original Research" perspective and from a relevancy perspective.
In the end, it is Wikipedia's task to make existing knowledge more widely
available, not to create new knowledge.

There should definitely be places where this material belongs, and in many
cases there are (I think of local historical societies, for example). The
question is, whether or not the WMF should aim to have such a place itself.
I have my doubts about it, because it does not look like an area where our
strongpoint (massive volunteer cooperation) has much additionial value, but
if the answer is yes, I think it should be as a new project - including it
in any of the existing projects would widen its scope so far that it would
water it down.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com