"NSLE (Wikipedia)" nsle.wikipedia@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.