Free Republic

The Scribe’s Problem I found Robert McHenry’s recent piece (http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=121305E) on the superiority of Britannica over Wikipedia to be fascinating, for I think he’s allowed himself an error of logic that we more usually encounter in economics. It was also a little unkind of the publishing gremlins to schedule his piece the day before Nature came out with that research ( SEE: http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/online-encyclopedias-put-to-the-test/2005/12/14/1134500913345.html) into the relative accuracies of the two approaches. The, umm, research that showed roughly comparable levels of errors in the amateur thing thrown together on the web and the one expensively and carefully produced by multiple levels...

Mysterious Scribe Writes Baghdad Web Log Fri Mar 28, 5:58 PM ET By RACHEL KONRAD, Associated Press Writer SAN JOSE, Calif. - Every day, tens of thousands of people turn to the Web seeking updates from a mysterious scribe whose detailed accounts of life in besieged Baghdad have made him a cyberspace celebrity. Little is known for sure about Salam Pax, whose nom de plume means "peace" in Arabic and Latin. But his Web journal — ostensibly written from his Baghdad home — vividly criticizes the authoritarian rule of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) and the U.S.-British war on...

Herculean task for modern scholars By Robert Fowler ALMOST all the texts we have of the ancient classics derive from generations of scribal copies, separated by many centuries from the originals. Most works of classical literature — some 90 per cent — were not even lucky enough to be copied and survive into modern times. Very occasionally, the archaeologist’s spade turns up fragments of books written in antiquity itself, allowing us direct access to lost works and what the ancients said. Some celebrated sites, such as Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, have yielded up splendid finds. Yet strangely, the most spectacular of...