So, during the last week of September I undertook a major re-writing of Richard Cantillon’s wikipedia article. That article is today’s featured article on Wikipedia’s main page. I thought people would be interested in knowing. Hopefully, I can get around to re-writing the article for Human Action (I’ve been trying to get to reading Hülsmann biography first, in any event).
Also, unsurprisingly, someone brought up a criticism of the referencing of the article, calling it unreliable and biased (challenging the reliability of the Ludwig von Mises Institute). Hopefully, he won’t care to respond to me.
Good work. I didn’t know that John Locke had a version of the quantity theory, though. Also, this criticism seems quite fair:
“The non-reliability of this source is exemplified in the statement “a methodology similar to Carl Menger’s methodological individualism,[50] by deducing complex phenomena from simple observations” which seems to imply that “deducing complex phenomena from simple observations” is somehow particular to the Austrian school, or Menger and Cantillion, rather than to Economics in general or even more broadly science. Also it seems to conflate “deducing complex phenomena from simple observations” with “methodological individualism” even though these are a completely different specie of beast and logically unrelated.”
Be careful, if “LK” gets wind of it, it could get ugly. LK may use the issue to try again to establish mises.org as an “untrustworthy source” in general, like he did when Sukrit and NewLiberty tried to use my Krugman articles as a source for mentioning the housing-bubble quotes in the Krugman wikipedia article. LK’s mission is to make Wikipedia economics content represent only establishment econ to the fullest extent possible. Good luck.
I’ve never had to deal with defending a reference, but I have a pretty good handle on Wikipedia’s reliability guidelines. I think they question the Mises Institute’s reliability as a publisher in general, which is just ridiculous (as is claiming that the QJAE is unreliable because none of the panel of peer reviewers are “outside scholars” (as if any academic journal includes panel members who are “outside scholars”, within the context of intellectual school of thought or main beliefs). But, it’s OK; I defended the Institute’s reliability through the featured article candidacy, so I can defend it here (it really is a never ending battle).