[GTALUG] RMS on britannica.com

[Stewart Russell]

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 10:21, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
wrote:

>
> The article seems to be mostly limited to non-controversial and positive
> things.  It seems to be written very sympathetically.  That's probably
> appropriate.
>

Britannica doesn't really rank as a quality reference work. It was more
concerned with selling sets door-to-door than what was in it. Sure, they'd
sometimes pay well-known people to write high profile articles, but the
fact-checking wasn't always there. For decades in the mid twentieth
century, for example, they'd happily print whatever the Soviet news agency
would feed them with no reference checks. I believe that Brittanica even
gave Lysenkoism¹  a non-critical entry for a while.

cheers,
 Stewart

----
¹: Lysenkoism — a political movement against scientific (Mendelian)
genetics and farming methods that was supported by Stalin and promoted by
Trofim Lysenko, director of genetics at the Academy of Sciences in the
USSR. Scientists who disagreed with Lysenko faced exile and many were
executed. Lysenko's theories set back food production in Soviet-aligned
countries for decades, and may have contributed to the famines in China
from 1959–61.
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