[Foundation-l] The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (from the Chronicle) + some citation discussions

Achal Prabhala aprabhala at gmail.com
Wed Feb 22 18:53:47 UTC 2012


Thank you Tom, and Sarah, for your very helpful explanations - they are 
extremely useful.

There's a discussion on at the reliable sources notice board, for 
instance, which highlights some of the interpretive problems you raise: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Citations

Can I ask you how you would analyse the work of the oral citations 
project (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations) in 
terms of our policies on original research, and verifiability?

And further, how these policies might apply to the idea of social media, 
as well as more private archives, say, corporate archives, being used as 
citations? (And on that point, is there a difference between the the 
Native American folk archive at the Smithsonian and the corporate 
archives of the Michelin corporation in France, for our purposes?)

Okay, I know that's asking a lot :)


On Wednesday 22 February 2012 08:56 PM, Sarah wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 11:01 AM, Achal Prabhala<aprabhala at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> An aside: there are millions of oral testimonies hosted at thousands of
>> extremely reputable organisations - on Native American life at the
>> Smithsonian, or Holocaust history at Yale - which currently have no place on
>> Wikipedia, because they're primary sources.
> There is no policy disallowing the use of primary sources on the
> English Wikipedia. They have to be used carefully, because it's easy
> to misuse them, but they're definitely allowed. See the NOR policy --
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:No_original_research&oldid=478167288#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources
>
> Sarah
>
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