Encyclopedia Highs and Lows
by Alex
Two quick links to demonstrate how uneven online encyclopedias can be: The government of New Zealand has a “new, bilingual encyclopedia of New Zealand”:http://www.teara.govt.nz/ online. I think they’re still adding content to it, but the front-end is very pretty. Currently there is no entry for ‘”moko”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moko ‘ or ‘”Crowded House”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowded_House” (which, _ahem_, Wikipedia does). But they do have the entirety of the 1960s edition of the Encyclopedia of New Zealand on-line, so that’s something.
Then, on the other hand, there is “anthropology.net”:http://anthropology.net/, run by “Kambriz Kambrani”:http://kambiz.kamrani.net/. I first saw the sight when he added it as a useful sight on the anthropology page of wikipedia and have been checking out his three or four reinstalls of the software ever since, watching him add and re-add the ‘anthropology’ entry to the site. I think the idea is that it’s terrible that there is no anthropology-centric wiki around and so if he sets it up then it will Magically Fill With Content. I wonder, though, if he appreciates how work anthropologists have put into the wikipedia — including such gargantuan (indeed, _too_ gargantuan) efforts such as “the wikipedia entry on Franz Boas”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Boas which blows Sol Tax’s little entry in Britannica out of the water. Given the way anthropology.net has been handled so far, I’m not about to about to jump ship and start writing on it after having spent so much time hand-crafting hoppy, light and refreshing entries on “Henri Hubert”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Hubert, “Karl Polanyi”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Polanyi, and “A.M. Hocart”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Maurice_Hocart.
To me, the “not have withstood the test of time” line in the Polanyi entry seems to, perhaps, imply that the von Mises Institute paper that’s linked to is an important rebuttal.
Yeah, well, I’m not the only person who’s contributed to that page — and you’ve got to let everyone try their hand at wikipedia, even if you think they’re crazy. That paper included in the Further Reading is, I agree, particularly is atrocious. However, my understanding is that in fact by now most historians think there are several things wrong with Polanyi’s empirical thesis in Great Transformation. IIRC Ira Katznelson’s chapter on Polanyi in “Desolation and Enlightenment” has a pretty extensive bibliography on the scholarly opinion on Polanyi’s arguments about Britain.