[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

[Castelo]

On 25-02-2012 06:02, Lodewijk wrote:
> 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
Hi, Lodewijk

I don't believe oral citations are unavoidable, i believe they can help 
in sourcing informations not yet covered by printed materials. Yes, it's 
possibile to avoid them, but "possible" doesn't means "feasible", in 
practical terms. All information that we can have by oral citations 
surely can be inserted in a book, someday. But for centuries, this 
wasn't made, and there's no evidence to think they will be now. I will 
then rather give you one example on oral citations can be more feasible 
than classical sources:

In Brazil, there are ~230 indigenous peoples, each one with their own 
traditions, clothing, cuisine, rituals, beliefs, and languages. Some of 
them are well covered by anthropologists, while others aren't. We can 
say a lot in an article on Yanomami people [1], but on the Aikanã[2], 
all the info published in books or in internet are already in the 
article, and there are still a huge lack about their traditions, and 
their differences to the others. That solution of "wait for a book to be 
published by someone" is been used, with minor results, in this case. By 
oral citations, we don't want to replace the info already inserted, but 
we can complement the article, by inserting info about what is missing, 
and we can easily check by ourselves, as i told before (attending a 
presentation of the people itself at indigenous national museum and 
recording an interview for collect those specific informations that are 
not covered by the sources we found).

In my opinion, and i already pointed that in Meta discussion, Wikipedia 
is not the place for original content, but Wikinews can publish the 
interviews and the content can be uploaded to Commons so others 
volunteers can check the material. We can create an editing process that 
fits the criteria for reliable sources in Wikipedia. I don't see any 
diference between this and using a newspaper that would make exactly the 
same thing (well, a bit less transparently) and would be undoubtly 
considered a reliable source. The only reason for this is that are no 
newspapers or books covering this issues now (and in the last 5 
centuries). How long we must wait for them to start covering those 
topics, before we can edit well-known (and undisputed) informations 
about that?

Regards,

Castelo

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanomami
[2] http://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aican%C3%A3s