[Wikipedia-l] Entries for deletion.... issues from the Third World

Tue Jan 9 12:00:53 UTC 2007

This is true. However, is there a workable solution to that?

I remember when people didn't worry too much about references on
Wikipedia. Sure, you were supposed to have them, but as long as you
had a nice article, nobody cared.

Well, what if I know the truth, but it is not written anywhere? What
if I interview 100 people to make sure they agree, and they do? What
if it is common knowledge in my village, which nobody will challenge?

The answer: it will be labeled "unverifiable" or "non-notable" and deleted.

Wikipedia's current message to the world: If it's never been written
about, or been mentioned in a sound recording or a film, it's not
important.

Well:

1) Not all cultures have writing.
2) Among those cultures which DO have writing, they each place
different importance values on it. In my daily life, I am using it
constantly. My desk is littered with books with their titles written
on them, products with their labels. If I go driving, some of the
signs will have writing on them, there are billboards, signs for
businesses, all of them using writing. But in some cultures, writing
may not be used so extensively. Maybe it is usually just used for
poetry, or just for writing letters to people who are far away. The
concept of mass communication is foreign to most cultures still, and
if you don't need mass communication, writing is hardly necessary,
except to write a letter to someone who is not present.
3) Among the population of the Earth, a very, very large portion live
in societies that are not highly literate or which don't place a high
importance on writing. Most societies don't record every aspect of
life the way we do. Yes, there are newspapers in India (although to
the best of my knowledge there are no newspapers in Igbo or Aymara or
Afar), there are books in Nepal, but if you look it up, the sheer
volume of materials published in the First World per-capita far, far,
far, far exceeds that of anywhere else.

Here, if someone sees an insect doing something strange, they write a
paper or a book about it, and if they don't, somebody else will! But
in most countries, this is not the case. Books cost money to make.
People in developing countries often don't have this money. There are
no or (comparatively) few publishers there, and those that do exist
cannot afford to put out the sheer volume of books put out by
publishers here because the demand tends to be much lower (especially
for non-fiction books). They do not have Amazon.com or massive
real-life bookstores, so "specialty" books would not sell because they
would have no way to reach their intended audience!

And they say, that the internet will change all this. Well, in these
societies, although internet access is on the rise, it is still very,
very, low. Even if you do have internet access, it takes a somewhat
higher degree of computer literacy to be able to _publish_ on the
internet. What? You want to put your knowledge on Wikipedia? Go ahead!

...

Sorry, your knowledge is not referenced. It has been deleted. You know
nothing that is worth anything.

We are telling the developing world that they do not matter and that
they are stupid.

Mark

On 09/01/07, J.L.W.S. The Special One <hildanknight at gmail.com> wrote:
> Requiring verifiability creates systemic bias. To be more accurate, it
> enforces the systemic bias of existing references.
>
> On 1/9/07, Michael Billington <michael.billington at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 1/9/07, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> > >
> > > Andre Engels wrote:
> > > > I guess I should not go into the examples, but in this case my opinion
> > > is
> > > > that 50,000 would be too high a limit,  I myself would be thinking of
> > > 2,000
> > > > or 5,000.
> > >
> > > Absolutely.  Perhaps for the U.S. and parts of Germany we are
> > > approaching full coverage of all places with 5,000 people.  But
> > > for India I doubt if we have covered all cities with 50,000.
> > > Nothing stops the limit from being set at 500 too.  But a lower
> > > limit could be questioned a lot more easily than a higher one.
> > > Then again, some places with 50,000 people are less notable than
> > > some very small places.  But if you can point to the fact that a
> > > place has 50,000 inhabitants (or was the birth places for a
> > > president), then it is a lot easier to defend its notability.
> > >
> >
> > On one side we have western places. For instance, Wikipedia has an article
> > about my town, political division and local member of parliament. My town
> > and surrounding ones (all of which have wiki articles) have a population of
> > 1,500 or so. Rambot has written articles about towns 1/10th of the size of
> > mine.
> >
> > However, whilst lists of Australian, German or US (and more) topics are
> > mostly blue links, there are lists populated almost entirely by red links,
> > such as [[List of Sudanese singers]]. Unfortunately, very few or no reliable
> > sources will probably be found to warrant articles about these singers (at
> > least not on the internet), and the only way to get coverage of a large
> > portion of them would be through original research (which we can't do
> > obviously), or to find print sources. So does anyone on this mailing list
> > happen to have access to archives for a Sudanese newspaper? It would be nice
> > if we could get more things like [[WP:AWNB]] for smaller countries, so we
> > can find people more local* who may very well be able to walk to a library
> > to find sources and add articles. That could work wonders for coverage :-)
> >
> > *And I may be a bit too ambitious in assuming we have editors from just
> > about every country
> >
> > Michael Billington
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wikipedia-l mailing list
> > Wikipedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
> >
>
>
> --
> Written with passion,
> J.L.W.S. The Special One
>
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>

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