Talk:Georges Ifrah

Generally not valid as a WP reference

   While i'm greatly impressed by the vision of his thinking and scope of his sources in Vol. 1 (which book i have at hand), i take the critiques cited by our bio on the accompanying article (esp. that of Vol.2, to which review i've so far given a the longer look) seriously enuf to see our use of him in refs problematic. In a line, he's self-trained, and an expert in his field has accused him of rampant errors both major and minor, at least in the second volume; IMO there's a prima facie case that he is not entitled to a presumption that citations of his work meet our criteria for RS. I.e., that each citation of him as a source needs an individual defense of his reliability re that specific assertion.
   What i propose to proceed with in the next 24 is tagging the approx 50 articles that appear to cite him with a somewhat harsh template for the Vol 1 citations, and a harsher one for the Vol 2 citations. I base that distinction on my first (i.e. tentative) impression from the 2-part professional scholarly review in a major journal (links in our bio article) that vol 2 is grossly inferior in thoro-ness and accuracy to vol 1 (which is likely to be provocative enuf to indeed become a classic even if he's full of crap!).
   Input from colleagues is more than welcome!
--Jerzy•t 20:59 21:04, & 21:10, 7 June 2012 (UTC)

I said "[within] the next 24 [hours]", but actually i'm not going to be able to spend more time on it this week.
--Jerzy•t 02:57, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

I second that criticism. Suggested reading, C. Philipp E. Nothaft: Medieval Europe’s satanic ciphers: on the genesis of a modern myth
esp. Sect. 3.3 and references therein. --Rainald62 (talk) 22:21, 25 April 2020 (UTC)