On Wed, 7 Apr 2021 at 10:21, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk <talk@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.