[GTALUG] RMS on britannica.com

[Karen Lewellen]

Stewart is absolutely correct.
Making this  online reference far from a suitable means of clearing up 
anything  regarding rMS as a person.
Kare



On Wed, 7 Apr 2021, Stewart Russell via talk wrote:

> 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.
>