[Foundation-l] Oral Citations project: People are Knowledge

Wed Jul 27 23:36:11 UTC 2011

2011/7/27 David Richfield <davidrichfield at gmail.com>:
>
> Lots of ethnographic work is very strongly based on interviews with
> people who have an oral tradition.  This is then published and, quite
> correctly, cited in Wikipedia: the view is that it is then a secondary
> source, and hence appropriate.  When we directly source oral
> interviews and host them on a sister project, the complaint is that
> this is a primary source: prone to small sample sizes, unscientific
> data gathering, and hidden biases on the part of the interviewers.
>
Some Wikinews reporters have introduced their interviews as sources on
Wikipedia, with some success -- linking directly to an audio recording
of the interview, not to the Wikinews story -- but there has been
resistance to it.

I've often wondered why we don't introduce video and audio recordings
to our articles, showing interviews by Wikipedians of notable primary
sources. It would make our articles significantly more interesting and
reader-friendly, and would tie in directly with efforts to record oral
histories.

Sarah