Talk:Eddie Ndopu

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First[edit]

I am aware of WP:VNT and of how relatively few black African people have attended Oxford Uni but concerned nonetheless about the origin of the "first" claim. It seems to have originated from around the time he was crowdfunding to covers the costs for his carer etc.

Disability is a broad term, personal details about early students from Africa at Oxford are sketchy, the university does not seem to support the claim (as in neither confirms nor denies). I recall the case of Jessica Rees in the 1980s, who was claimed to be the first deaf person at Oxbridge - a statement that it turned out originated with her and which was patently untrue if only because I was at Cambridge at that time and was born profoundly deaf. As it happens, and for completely different reasons, Rees was later "found out" on an unrelated claim connected to her time at Oxford and suffered reputational damage because of it - you can google that.

Given the lengthy history of the ancient universities, extraordinary claims such as these are pretty much impossible to verify accurately, regardless of journalistic sensationalism etc. And when they are verifiable by narrowing scope through intersection, you can end up with ridiculous claims. A cartoon in the Manchester Evening News once mocked this situation in a different context, being the love held by cricket commentators for statistics: it showed a batsman walking to the crease with a commentator in a radio booth saying "Jim, is this the first time an England cricket captain has ever taken to the field with dirty bootlaces?"

Just food for thought because I am really not convinced about this claim and think it may need to be qualified in some way. (And not in some way that further narrows the scope of achievement.) - Sitush (talk) 03:48, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I should clarify that the cited sources refer to him as the first disabled African at the university, not the first at the Blavatnik, which is a much narrower and less significant claim. I have amended the article accordingly. - Sitush (talk) 08:35, 6 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

And I have amended it again in the light of comments here. It is now an absurdly narrow claim that really has no significance. - Sitush (talk) 05:05, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

NMC meeting[edit]

The NMC meeting referred to in the article was vaguely connected to a UNESCO project but my googling suggests that it was a one-off event in 2010. NMC = Ni, Mondlokaj Civitanoj (Esperanto for We, Global Local Citizens) and the full name of the meet was the First NMC World Youth Meeting for a Sustainable Future. Pp 35 and 37 of this covers it but I'm not sure how best to deal with the clarification tag that I added - we have no article for it. - Sitush (talk) 07:13, 7 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]