[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] Stopping the presses:, , Britannica to stop printing books

[geni]

On 15 March 2012 15:23, Robin McCain <robin at slmr.com> wrote:
> In that specific case you'd need a team of archeologists and war crimes
> investigators to collect raw data and analyze it.

One Acholi speaking anthropologist would be enough.

> How much of this general lack of published information is due to local
> government policies (past or present) or destruction of records and how much
> is related to a recent conversion from oral history to written documents?

I'm not sure when Acholi first appeared in a written form but all the
examples I can find are in the latin alphabet so can't be that far
back. Other than that the area was outside the colonial heartland
(nominally British but largely nominally)  so early European coverage
tends towards being the somewhat exaggerated tales of men of
independent means going around shooting stuff (okay slightly unfair).
Later on there are a few missionaries and the like setting up schools
but they seem to have stayed close to the major centers of population
(in this case Gulu). May be some military records since the British
empire did recruit troops in that area. Might be some decent records
from the post independence area when the Acholi were in their
ascendency. After that though things are a bit messy.


> The willful suppression or destruction of historical records is one thing,
> lack of recordkeeping another.

Alternatively the European tradition of sinking significant resources
into record keeping could be considered odd.

> It is pretty obvious that recording of history must start somewhere. Even
> though that recording might not meet the WP standards for 2nd or 3rd layer
> analysis of 1st layer eyewitness accounts it still has value.
>
> Is there a WMF project to get this process of historical bootstrapping
> started in such locations? If not, perhaps we need to tie into another
> organization that is already working on this...

There is an oral history project but I'm not sure how viable that is.

-- 
geni