Re: [kidsgames] Information source.

[Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jeff@smluc.org>]

Hello,

On 1 Oct 1999 aleris@iag.net wrote:

> 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.

Hopefully OUR database ;)

>  I don't
> think copyright is an issue here unless we start posting tracts of quotes
> from Britannica.
> 

I thought that was what you were suggesting.

> Quoting from Britannica is probably a bad idea in any case.

Agreed on many levels.

>  A lot of
> Britannica has a Western cultural bias.

Sure.

>  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.

Well that is a scientific via of history and I tend to have that type of
view, I doubt that all historians via it that way.

>  We don't
> want to end up creating a system "geared" towards any particular culture.
> 

This will happen regardless of what we do, therefore we want, I think, to
make tools that are capable of making that bias clear to the user.
Instead of saying the application/content has no bais let's just state
what the bias is, perhaps another field in the database for this?


> 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.
> 

How do you present historical facts which are recorded from the point of
view of those that DID the recording without it being biased....  I don't
think that we need to, we just need to provide the mechanism by which the
bias can be taken into account.

> http://marauder.millersv.edu/~columbus/papers/butch-1.html
> 
> 
> Just some thoughts.    
> 

:) Thanks for sharing.....

> Rob


Jeff Waddell
jeff@smluc.org



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