[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 02/22/12 11:40 AM, Thomas Morton wrote:
>
> 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.

It's much more than a mere notability question
> 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).

Authors of secondary sources are particularly adept at this. It's not 
uncommon for a historian to build his evidence around a thesis, and be 
blind to most information that would disprove that thesis.

> 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, and it's that difference that is important for achieving 
NPOV. We need to fairly show both viewpoints. It's up to the reader to 
draw his own viewpoints, and not for us to provide pat answers.
> 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!

Maybe. Tea party members may not be the best narrators of Republican 
policy, nor union leaders of the Democratic policy. Both parties may 
generate a policy document at the convention. Are we to believe that a 
party member's secondary reading of the platform is more reliable than 
the platform document itself?
> If the author is a third party, of course, that lends weight to their
> material.

Sometimes.
> 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.

For most situations it's unrealistic to expect rigorous methodologies in 
historical material generated many years ago, and it may be all we have.

> 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".

It's that last statement that worries me. By removing the previous 
unverified material we are choosing which version the reader should 
believe.  Should we not be looking for the most fair and efficient way 
to keep both versions?

> 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.

Making oral citations "more reliable" seems a contradiction in terms.  
They are what they are. In some cases they may indeed be the basis for 
an entire article. Usability and availability of the material are 
significant problems. These are often unique items that are too easily 
the victims of life as it goes on around them.  They are also fraught 
with copyright problems even when the person being interviewed had no 
clue that he had such rights.
> 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!

It can be, but not necessarily so.  We make too much of the distinction 
between primary  and secondary source, and a person can too easily use 
the original source argument as a cudgel for beating back material that 
he opposes. If we insist that Joseph instead of Josef is the correct 
given name for Stalin because it appears more often in a Google search 
we become the authority.
> 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.
>
I would be extremely wary of anything from the blogoshere, though I'm 
sure reasonable arguments for it can be made on a case by case basis.

Ray