I'm going to go off on a tangent and complain about Ars Technica here.
As a long-time reader of the site, it feels to me like lately (ie. around the time Conde Nast bought them) the quality started slowly but surely sliding down. This here is yet another minor data-point that reinforces that feeling.
The original article covering the supposed discovery was written like it's pretty much a solved thing (yes, all the usual CYA phrases are there so the author can weasel out if it turns out not to be true). Yet for anyone who's ever heard about the Voynich manuscript, the extraordinary claim that it's deciphered should be substantiated with an extraordinary amount of evidence, the lack of which wasn't questioned at all.
Then, without as much as "oops, we've been duped too", the author goes on to describe why claims covered by the first article by so much enthusiasm are not true or proven, ending with an ad-hominem about the "discoverer". This (minus the ad hominems) really should've been part of the original article. Hell, split it into two pages if you're after the clicks!
To me, this says more about Ars than about the (non)issue at hand - it's finally slid down to the level of a typical net publication.
There's a big pattern at work if you look at the author involved in both articles. I've basically stopped reading anything by Annalee Newitz as she has basically had a run of 5 or 6 articles at this point that use hyperbolic language and are usually complete incorrect. The author occasionally posts a weasel-word apology or an "update" to the article that is a 180 from the strong claims she made, without explicitly stating she was dead wrong or, apparently, learning anything from it.
You can basically ignore anything she writes at this point as being in the "Buzzfeed" section of Ars, and hope that the rest of the site continues to do a decent job. Peter Bright seems alright.
Yeah, it's a bit disappointing, especially since I liked her writing at io9. I wonder how much pressure writers get to write more sensationalist pieces.
In particular they seem to have let their standards slip in regards to headlines. For example, the title of their first article about Gibbs' findings was "The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded". That makes it sound as if the matter is settled, when it is decidedly not.
I’ve been downvoted (and upvoted a bit) on Ars Technica for a comment that contained nothing but facts that go against the Ars echo chamber. I don’t see that as often here on Hacker News
As a long-time reader of the site, it feels to me like lately (ie. around the time Conde Nast bought them) the quality started slowly but surely sliding down. This here is yet another minor data-point that reinforces that feeling.
The original article covering the supposed discovery was written like it's pretty much a solved thing (yes, all the usual CYA phrases are there so the author can weasel out if it turns out not to be true). Yet for anyone who's ever heard about the Voynich manuscript, the extraordinary claim that it's deciphered should be substantiated with an extraordinary amount of evidence, the lack of which wasn't questioned at all.
Then, without as much as "oops, we've been duped too", the author goes on to describe why claims covered by the first article by so much enthusiasm are not true or proven, ending with an ad-hominem about the "discoverer". This (minus the ad hominems) really should've been part of the original article. Hell, split it into two pages if you're after the clicks!
To me, this says more about Ars than about the (non)issue at hand - it's finally slid down to the level of a typical net publication.
Sad!