User:Llywrch/Essay draft

Just another essay I'm working on. Not finished, but nothing I'm ashamed of.

The intent of this guideline or procedure is not to establish notability; a village can be the home of up to a thousand people, all of whom would be expected to consider their home a notable place. This guideline is intended to provide a means to determine which villages or small towns can be usefully written about, & therefore should be the subject of an article in Wikipedia. It arose following a long AfD over Gnaa, Nigeria, which required a lot of hard, careful work by A. B. to analyze the evidence. Common sense dictates that we shouldn't need to repeat this effort this for every questioned village.

Villages in the undeveloped or non-Western world pose problems that other communities do not have: a lack of verifiable information that allows a Wikipedian to write a usable article. As a result, some communities will fall into that uncomfortable limbo of being a place (thus deserving of an entry in Wikipedia), yet lack satisfactory materials to meet the need of verifiability.

In some cases, this will be due to lack of information. In other cases, it will be due to the impermanent nature of villages; what most notably distinguishes a village from a town is the village's lack of permanent structures. Villages appear, move & vanish not only due to famine, natural disasters or war, but sometimes simply because its inhabitants decide that another location is preferable. Thus sometimes there is a question of verifiability concerning villages, & many will continue to exist beyond the other relevant standards of Wikipedia.

As a result, for any community of under 1000 inhabitants (otherwise known as a "village"), proof of its existence should rest on one of two sources of data:


 * 1) Proof of official recognition; and/or
 * 2) Eyewitness evidence that the village existed in a definable location at a specific moment in time.

Proof of official recognition
By this, the best proof of the existence of a village is some form of recognition by the government which has jurisdiction over the community: inclusion in an official report, such as a national census, or as the object of a law or official act. This presumes that a government is the best source of information about its citizens.

Another source for proof, although not as authoritative, is the publications of non-governmental organizations (NGO), for example United Nation agencies, the World Bank, and charitable or religious groups. Here the presumption is that if they have people on the ground doing work in a specific place, then the NGO must have some proof that this place exists. As a note, many NGOs include a disclaimer that their publications are not meant to provide official recognition of boundaries or national subdivisions. This is not relevant to the needs of Wikipedia, which is merely to establish a plausible opinion on the existence of a community.

Eyewitness evidence
Then again, official information may misrepresent the actual, physical truth. For reasons that include such things as international pride and ethnic prejudice, a government may claim that a village exists where there is none -- or deny one where it does exist.

The following examples of evidence has been grouped under the catch-all title of "eyewitness evidence", because it can be presumed that all use evidence provided by an eyewitness: someone has actually visited the village in question, & provided enough evidence of its existence that it can reasonably be assumed to have existed.

These examples include:
 * Published histories, where the passage is judged to be reliable by the experts
 * Accounts by professionals, such as archeologists, anthropologists, or naturalists, where it can be presumed their professional ethics require them to provide reliable information. (However, some of these professionals will alter details about people or places to preserve privacy or safety; when this is mentioned in the publication, those details which
 * Articles by journalists, whose accounts are judged to be reliable
 * Accounts by travelers, where the passage is judged to be reliable by the experts

Once evidence from these categories is provided for an article, then we can allow this article in Wikipedia.