The Argument Clinic

[Tim]

@Eddie

My preferred model to Wikipedia would be any traditional encyclopedia edited and written by trained scholars who are completely up front about their names, qualifications, and institutions. That can easily be done online, just as peer-reviewed journals are now regularly produced online. In fact, a traditional “expert-written” encyclopedia could even incorporate suggestions and corrections from lay, amateur contributors – but the decision which suggestions or corrections to include would remain in the hands of the trained experts in the subject areas, not in the hands of the lay amateurs.

Oh this is priceless.

An online encyclopedia that is done “just as peer-reviewed journals are now regularly produced online”. Now where have I heard of that before?

Oh yes, it was in this post where I informed Eddie 22 days ago about the existence of Scholarpedia, " an English-language wiki-based online encyclopedia with features commonly associated with open-access online academic journals".

And by some amazing coincidence, that was the very post that I linked to in my above post where I talked about “Eddie’s preferred model”.

As I mentioned in my (22 day old) post, “the relatively tiny number of articles it has (1,804) demonstrates, the model doesn’t scale nearly so well.” I might also mention the fact that (almost) nobody has even heard of Scholarpedia as another drawback of this model. It’s profile is in fact so low that people like Eddie cannot even remember it’s existence after being told about it within the last month.

All this goes to show that whilst Eddie’s interminable and inane bluster may be of no informational value, it is a constant source of unintentional humor.