[Foundation-l] Oral Citations Sourcing

[Ray Saintonge]

On 02/23/12 5:48 PM, Florence Devouard wrote:
> 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".
>

I'm not familiar with what might be available from Michelin, but there 
are others (like the Hudson's Bay Company) who have made archives more 
available.

For other companies hiring an external service can be a green light to 
throw out the "garbage" so as to leave room to store more recent stuff.  
Libraries do this too. The BBC's toss-out of Dr. Who episodes is 
legendary.  So many things that I buy have come from libraries looking 
for the scrap value of material with an ex-libris label showing it was 
the gift from some donor who thought it would stay with the library 
forever. The pages are often uncut.

Corporate archives will frequently include reports to headquarters from 
agents in the field in far-flung places. (The Wikileaks diplomatic 
correspondence came from a huge network of such agents.)  Many give a 
unique perspective on events, and other sources to corroborate the 
information don't exist. If they do exist they can either be too recent 
to release without embarrassing someone, or too old to be easily found.

The amount of material that exists in various archives is beyond most of 
our capacities to imagine, and perhaps even beyond the capacity of our 
collective imagination.  That's the biggest challenge to documenting the 
sum of human knowledge.  Waiting for historians or other "experts" to 
provide reliable secondary sources simply won't work. What these experts 
choose to write about is just as much a matter of whim as a volunteer's 
choice of what to add to Wikipedia.

Oral citations are only one facet of the challenge.  Wikipedia is only 
one facet of the solution. Restructuring the epistemology requires a 
larger vision than the one that gave us Wikipedia.

Ray