[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

[Ziko van Dijk]

Leave the use of historical sources to historians, and then cite from
their books. That's what historians are for.
Kind regards
Ziko


2012/2/24 Florence Devouard <anthere9 at yahoo.com>:
> On 2/23/12 7:29 PM, Achal Prabhala wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thursday 23 February 2012 01:10 AM, Thomas Morton wrote:
>>>
>>> Splitting this off, Achal, I hope that's OK :)
>>>
>>> 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<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard#Oral_Citations>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks for the pointer there; I'll try and place some comments in there
>>> later. It is certainly an interesting discussion.
>>>
>>> But here are some initial thoughts (please bear in mind I have only
>>> scanned
>>> that discussion, and whilst I have had an ongoing interest in the oral
>>> citations project I never dug into in too much depth). Also remember this
>>> is based on my interpretation of our policies, so others may well differ!
>>>
>>>
>>>> Can I ask you how you would analyse the work of the oral citations
>>>> project
>>>>
>>>> (http://meta.wikimedia.org/**wiki/Research:Oral_Citations<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Oral_Citations>)
>>>>
>>>> in terms of our policies on original research, and verifiability?
>>>>
>>> The best way I can address this is to lay out my thoughts on our sourcing
>>> policy.
>>>
>>> Material on Wikipedia can be divided into "fact" and "opinion". The
>>> latter
>>> of these is, perhaps confusingly, the simplest to address; because
>>> opinion,
>>> viewpoints and perception can quite easily be collated and summarised.
>>> The
>>> only real difficulty exists in figuring out which opinions are noteworthy
>>> to record.
>>>
>>> The problem is facts; as I am sure everyone can appreciate, facts are
>>> very
>>> easy to get wrong (maliciously or not). This is especially a problem in
>>> History where events can be pieced together via all manner of sources.
>>> Even
>>> WW2 history can differ dramatically depending on the accounts you read -
>>> some overuse oral citation (humans are fallible) and others misuse
>>> official
>>> records (which can range from faked through to inaccurate).
>>>
>>> The problem with primary sourcing of the oral form is that it comes
>>> directly from an individual - with all of their perceptions and
>>> biases. To
>>> make an extreme example out of this; imagine taking an oral citation from
>>> Hitler, and a Jew in a concentration camp. Such citations would, I
>>> imagine,
>>> give radically different viewpoints of the Holocaust. Obviously other
>>> accounts, by third parties, show us which account is accurate - but if we
>>> had only those two viewpoints I hope it is obvious how
>>> difficult separating fact and fiction could be (ignoring that any
>>> rational
>>> person would see the obvious).
>>
>>
>> Of course. So, for the oral citations project, we specifically chose
>> topics that are in the present, that are seen and done by thousands of
>> people (i.e. not obscure), and that are also as uncontroversial as
>> possible. Examples: village games, temple rituals, recipes.
>>
>>
>>>
>>> So that brings us to the ideas behind sourcing; which is that we should
>>> consider not only the material but author and publisher. This is
>>> important
>>> because if the author of the source is partisan to the material then you
>>> have to consider they may be biased to their viewpoint. As less extreme
>>> example might be two citations from a Republican and a Democrat. Both say
>>> "My Party is the Best because our policies are..." - you can't use either
>>> source to say one party is better, because they are partisan. But you
>>> could
>>> use it to relate their parties policies; and as partisans they are well
>>> positioned to relate those policies!
>>>
>>> If the author is a third party, of course, that lends weight to their
>>> material.
>>>
>>> The publisher is the stumbling block in this case; because it is a
>>> non-expert [sic] researcher uploading material to Commons. What could
>>> mitigate this is a detailed description of the methodology used to
>>> collect
>>> the citations, which would allow editors to review it for problems.
>>>
>>> One final thing to consider is that WP:V talks about controversial or
>>> challenged material. Whilst that might be a risk policy on the face (it
>>> would be easy to present something non-controversial but also not true as
>>> fact) it's critical to letting us actually write article (otherwise we
>>> would be stifled in citations :)). For example; I've sourced material to
>>> personal sites before with minimal problems - sometimes it is questioned
>>> and what I usually say is "If you can show someone saying the
>>> opposite, or
>>> make a sensible argument against, then lets remove it". (FWIW, and
>>> this is
>>> an aside, I think is relaxed form to building articles is a Good
>>> Thing, and
>>> we should do it more often - worrying about being wrong is stifling).
>>>
>>> So now I've picked it apart here is my thinking; Oral citations on
>>> Commons
>>> could be excellent sources in the right context.
>>
>>
>> :)
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Sure if the material is disputed or otherwise problematic then it is
>>> better
>>> to look for a source that has peer review. But for simplistic, factual
>>> things then I think it is rock solid. One example that comes to mind
>>> (and I
>>> don't know if the Oral citations covers this sort of thing) is this: I
>>> was
>>> recently on holiday in New Zealand. They have excellent museums there,
>>> fanatically maintained (which is amazing compared to most countries...).
>>> One nice feature is that a lot of the Mauri history exhibits have audio
>>> from those of Mauri ancestory describing some cultural fact or other.
>>> Things like recipes.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, we encountered exactly this. When looking for aspects of everyday
>> life that people both widely knew about and did in India and South
>> Africa, but were also undocumented in scholarship or even print,
>> everything we had came back to 'culture'.
>>
>>
>>> Something like that is an excellent oral citation; the author is
>>> authoritative (being Mauri) and the content uncontroversial.
>>>
>>> Boiled down, I think that oral citations have a distinct place as a
>>> source
>>> - and we should encourage people to consider them as sources when
>>> writing.
>>> But they are not something you could, for example, base an entire article
>>> around. We should also explore ways to make them more "reliable", and
>>> more
>>> usable. For example making them obviously available to experts in the
>>> field
>>> they cover.
>>
>>
>>
>> I agree that an article wholly based on oral citations is less desirable
>> than an article that mixes traditional and non-traditional sources. Two
>> things here though: (a) There are actually a pretty large number of
>> things that are both widely known and done and not documented in print,
>> so this is a real problem; and in these cases, having articles solely
>> based on oral citations could still be useful, akin to a stub, awaiting
>> further refinement. (b) Though this is not directly related to the
>> conversation, it does relate to earlier points made by Sarah and you
>> regarding primary sources. It is sometimes hard to separate fact from
>> opinion within the oral citation - which is to say, X person's fact may
>> be Y person's opinion, etc. - and in my opinion, even the cleanest set
>> of facts gleamed from an oral citation will contain some perspective or
>> opinion. I don't see that as a problem (and this is regardless of how it
>> would parse through the OR policy) as long as the perspective is
>> attributed as just that, or even challenged. We encountered this, and
>> recorded it - in articles on village games in Limpopo in South Africa.
>> The older ladies we spoke to said young people didn't play the games
>> they had just shown us, and the young people we spoke to said they did,
>> but with a slightly different template, and we recorded and reported it
>> exactly as said, as two conflicting perspectives. (Would that be a
>> responsible use of primary sources? I think so.)
>>
>>
>>>
>>> It *is* important to get secondary coverage of a topic, because we are
>>> tertiary source. This is the core idea of our primary source policy;
>>> if we
>>> utilise primary material and research something to the extent that we are
>>> the main authoritative source that becomes *hugely* problematic!
>>>
>>> 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?)
>>>>
>>> Corporate archives I would deal with in the same way as any primary
>>> source;
>>> use it to cite facts, bear in mind the author/publisher. WP:SPS talks
>>> about
>>> being wary of unduly self-serving material, and I think that is an
>>> excellent way of putting the approach to corporate archives.
>>
>>
>>
>> I had an interesting discussion on this with Florence and Christophe, so
>> I'll share this with them if they miss it here. My own first instinct is
>> to trust a self-avowedly 'neutral' source (like the Smithsonian) more
>> than a corporation (like Michelin) but for our purposes, it doesn't seem
>> to make much sense to treat them any differently.
>
>
> Bear with me, I'd love it if the Michelin Corp was opening its archives :)
> But having worked for them and living in the city of their headquarters,
> their discretion and love of confidentiality is such that I doubt it will
> happen :(
>
> The situation is complex. Should corp archives be somehow trusted or not
> much or not at all. I would say "it depends".
> It depends on the company (reputation).
> It depends largely of which department produced the archives. Docs produced
> by marketing departments should be taken with a HUGE pinch of salt. The
> language is non neutral, they conveniently drop the embarassing facts, and
> they tend to forget to put basic stuff such as dates ("ok, it is written you
> produce 10 millions yoghurt, but when was that ?") or references to
> countries ("ok, you write that you sell 10 millions of yoghurt in Global
> South, but can you better define which Global South you are talking about
> ?") (yeah, true stories even if figures are invented).
>
> Docs produced by departments of research or finances, I would put a lot of
> trust in them. There is always the bad luck to stumble on a cheating company
> just as it also happens that Museum Staff host a black sheep from time to
> time. But generally, I consider information out of these departments quite
> safe.
>
> But the most difficult ennoying point is simply that most corp archives
> appear to be a mess. Because companies are bought and sold, information is
> lost on the way. Because of poor communication between departments. Because
> staff come and go. And because the acceleration of business processes
> unfortunately make it so that in the past dozen of years, less and less time
> and money has been spent (invested) on a proper archive system, on good
> procedures and efficient implementation. So when you ask "can you retrieve
> the past 20 years of sales regarding this yoghurt", you'll get a blank
> stare. Truth is, no one knows the date and no one knows where to find the
> info.
>
> Some companies sometimes hire external services (private historians) to
> "clean up" their archives and some good stuff can get out of this, such as a
> book or a museum (Michelin did that. Do visit the museum
> http://www.aventure-michelin.com/ if you happen to come. It is very nicely
> done).
>
> Usually, I recommand good sense. If the information does not appear "weird"
> or "controversial" at all, I use the corp information as "trusted source".
> If it is clearly misleading or potentially illegal info, I trash it. But in
> between there is room to accept the data as long as there is another source,
> that may not be so great but that appears independant. For large companies,
> there are usually independant sources. But for most medium size companies,
> not. I give the situation a certain degree of tolerance.
>
> Difficult to put that into any sort of policy except for "good sense".
>
> Florence
>
>>>
>>> In terms of social media, this is tricky. Because social media is vastly
>>> more accessible than other mediums - particularly to hacks. Wordpress
>>> blogs
>>> are trivial to make, for example, and you can sound authoritative or
>>> convincing on a subject to a layman with only medium effort. I'd treat
>>> these with more caution.
>>>
>>> Phew, that was dumped out in a stream of conciousness way - so it
>>> might be
>>> a bit "buggy". But that's what I figure :)
>>>
>>> Tom
>>>
>>> (Just as a note; I consider "publisher" quite broadly - i.e. the
>>> person who
>>> hosts or maintains the material)
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Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
dr. Ziko van Dijk, voorzitter
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