"NSLE (Wikipedia)" <nsle.wikipedia(a)gmail.com> writes:
This was emphasised in both his RFA and RFB, too...
And someone pointed out that warning signs were easy to spot -
just no-one
did. Some who studied canon law with la-1 babel box?
Is that so really easy to spot? I don't believe it is, except with
the benefit of hindsight.
When I go to [[canon law]], I see "Canon law is the term used for
the internal ecclesiastical law which governs various churches,
most notably the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox
Churches and the Anglican Communion of churches." Now, this
doesn't directly say that 'canon law' with reference to Essjay
*must* be referring specifically to the Roman Catholic Church, and
it's easy to forget that most Catholic literature is in Latin even
now - I know that it is very easy for even Catholics to forget
that most historical Church literature is Latin (as my family is
Catholic, if I may claim some personal experience in this
matter). Indeed, I myself sometimes forget this, such as when I go
to read a Papal encyclical and unawares am taken to the official
English translation, never noticing the fine print saying the
original is in Latin.
Even if I were to consider this, I still couldn't be sure that
this is a contradiction: maybe canon law degrees just don't
require that much expertise in Latin, or maybe a modern canon law
degree deals with Greek and Aramaic texts primarily, or maybe they
can just use translations or English originals these days. Even if
I were a ultra-curious layman, if I search for the obvious [[canon
law degree]] (which didn't exist until I created it just now), I
(might) end up at [[Doctor of Canon Law]] - which never mentions
Latin except to translate the title! In fact, even after pondering
and searching a fair bit, I honestly have to say I am not sure
enough that a claim of canon law degree and la-1 babel box is
contradictory enough for me to enquire further (which definitely
does not AGF, as it at least implicitly is calling what was a very
respected user a liar).
To give an analogy, if I saw a user page of someone which claimed
to be a Doctor of computer science with a specialty in functional
programming, and it said that the person wasn't an expert in
assembly or Haskell or the ML family or a Lisp, I would not be
suspicious - looking up their Wikipedia entries, they are all
fairly hard and rarefied languages compared to more popular
languages like C or Java; but if I saw that they were unfamiliar
with types, or functions, or objects, then I could be sure they
were claiming unwarranted expertise. The latter would be more
suspicious to me than the former - although in point of fact,
being the knowledgeable person I am, I would know that it is very
very unlikely these days for someone to achieve a PhD while
specializing in functional programming *and* not know one of the
cited languages, and I could be appropriately suspicious. I
believe the warning signs were Essjay were more of the former
sort, ones that enough data was there for experts and very
interested laypersons to figure it out if they thought about it,
but just not enough for the rest of us unless we already know.
--
Gwern
Inquiring minds want to know.