On Fri, Mar 1, 2013 at 3:08 PM, Richard Welty <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/1/13 4:54 PM, Ed Dykhuizen wrote: >> >> I can probably throw in some input here. I don't know if you'll be able to >> construct standards for acceptability beforehand. Maybe there can be some >> -- no Atlantises, for example -- but I imagine that there are going to be >> a >> ton of disputes that won't get resolved, and in order to show something >> coherent, you'll have to rely on the judgments of a bunch of qualified >> editors. Sometimes you'll want to show both sides, like the possible >> routes >> of Hannibal or the Kashmir dispute. Sometimes you'll have to just ignore >> theories that have less traction in historical discourse. You could set up >> methods for resolving disagreements beforehand, but probably can't start >> out with many specific standards of what constitutes historical accuracy. >> > +1 > > even in the history of the American Civil War, which is only 150 years past, > there are both known and unknown problems in historic knowledge, and > erroneous conventional wisdom that is in some cases being detected and > fixed, and in other cases, well, not being fixed. > > the further in the past you go, the worse it's going to be. > > richard
Agreed with both of you. I'm comfortable with multiple and possibly competing hypotheses. I just wanted to raise the issue and suggest that evidence cited might serve us where ground truthing cannot. -- Sean Gillies _______________________________________________ Historic mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic
