Re: [kidsgames] Information source.

[aleris@iag.net]

Quoting Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jeff@smluc.org>:

> On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Doug Loss wrote:
> > > Chris Ellec wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > > From: aleris@iag.net
> > > > >
> > > > > In that spirit I guess I have a non-technical question.  What do we
> want to use
> > > > > as authoritative sources of information?
> > 
> > This URL is pretty authoritative
> > 
> > http://www.britannica.com/
> > 
> 
> Yes, but do we have any rights to the content.  As far as I know it's
> copyrighted in ways that make it unuseable for our purposes.  I would
> really LOVE to be proven wrong about that.

I think the question is more about what we could agree on as a quality
source of fact rather than something to directly quote from.  I don't
think copyright is an issue here unless we start posting tracts of quotes
from Britannica.

Quoting from Britannica is probably a bad idea in any case.  A lot of
Britannica has a Western cultural bias.  This was part of what I was
asking about.  Particularly in history subjects, I think we need to be
careful about discerning cultural bias from fact and evidence.  We don't
want to end up creating a system "geared" towards any particular culture.

Example: Christopher Columbus.  We all learned in grade school about how
he discovered the New World.  There is currently a trend in the U.S. to
paint Columbus as an invading marauder against native Americans.  This is
the kind of thing we need to avoid, this sort of cultural bias.  Fact is,
Columbus went to his deathbed convinced that he had found the Indies rather
than a new continent.  Amerigo Vespucci was a lot more responsible for
the "discovery" of the New World than Columbus.

http://marauder.millersv.edu/~columbus/papers/butch-1.html


Just some thoughts.    

Rob

-
kidgames@smluc.org  -- To get off this list send "unsubscribe" in the
body of a message to majordomo@smluc.org