[Foundation-l] On Wikinews

[Ray Saintonge]

On 09/15/11 11:51 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> 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.
>
I'm completely open to the notion that this could be on a completely 
different project from Wikinews.

Anything other than publishing as a whole would require some serious POV 
editing. Who would decide on what the important facts are? Nor is this a 
question of creating knowledge; the knowledge was there already in the 
mind of the person being interviewed.  The relevance can only be judged 
in the context of other similar memoirs about the same events.

Teaming up with local historical societies would be important.  I'm sure 
that many of them are already sitting on large collections of this 
material, and making it available is beyond their abilities. Massive 
volunteer cooperation is just as important to them as to us, but they 
have typically drawn from a different demographic.

If we can send people into communities to take pictures of every 
important building, it should be just as possible to send them there to 
collect stories.

For the U.S., given Obama's push on job creation, the W.P.A.'s cultural 
programs in the 1930s could be a great example.

Ray