[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

Ting Chen wing.philopp at gmx.de
Sat Feb 25 10:01:38 UTC 2012


Mountain, the first ever editor on zh-wp, and still active until today, 
told me the following story one day (it was before the Oral Citation 
project but I remembered the story very well):

He came from the coast of Shandong, and his father told him that earlier 
there was a local tradition where people went early morning to the coast 
to catch crabs or mollusks (one of them). They used to use a special 
technique to catch the animals. But meanwhile no one is using this 
technique anymore, not only because there are now plenty of crabs or 
mollusks on the market from the hydroculture, but also because the coast 
which was wild earlier are now all urbanized, with oil terminals and 
harbors and those. When Mountain told me that story he felt he would 
like to write down those stories because in maybe 10 or 20 years, latest 
in 50 years, no one would ever know that there was such a thing on the 
world. And that tradition would be lost for ever. But he also felt he 
could not write them on Wikipedia because he had no resources, because 
until now no of the ethmologists ever had interested on such traditions 
and no academic resources ever mentioned it. With the Oral Citations 
Sourcing it would be possible to interview the old people or even let 
them show how the techniques worked.

Greetings
Ting

On 25.02.2012 09:02, wrote Lodewijk:
> Hi Castelo,
>
> just to make the discussion clearer: could you just give say 5 or 10
> examples of topics where you believe oral citations are unavoidable? Then I
> hope that Ziko in his turn can explain how we can write about those
> examples without using them.
>
> Best regards,
> Lodewijk
>





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