Talk:The Know-It-All

AfD

This article was recently nominated for deletion and consensus was to keep it. See Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World for the archived discussion. -- Francs2000 | Talk 11:33, 7 August 2005 (UTC)

Queenan

stballsback, why not address issues here rather than mindlessly reverting changes (such as the link I added to Queenan's article--how can you argue that is not relevant? You can't, but you can be a hall monitor about it.

It's absolutely unacceptable to have the author's "assistant" included in the review quotes...there is no reason to believe his assistant is other than his own sock puppet. I have removed the quote.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.81.118.101 (talk • contribs) .

I can agree to that point. Please refrain from altering the intent of the other sections though. It is clear you are editing from a severe bias for whatever reason and it is detrimental to the Neutral Point of View Policy of the Wikipedia. On top of that, your edit to my User Page is considered vandalism and continuing in such a manner will result in warnings on your User Talk page. Any comments you have for me should be free of personal attacks firstmost and also located on my Talk page. You should also become familiar with ending your discussion comments with four tildes (~~~~) to add an author/timestamp for better clarity to the reader. Thanks. ju66l3r 05:48, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Your assertion about the quality of Jacobs' rebuttal is pure POV. You can protest all you want but I am removing the POV and also clarifying the substance of Queenan's original review (he does more than simply insult Jacobs--once again I beg you to read the source material that you are altering descriptions of).—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 64.81.118.101 (talk • contribs) .

The quality of Jacobs rebuttal is clearly funny. I would be happy to extract some of the passages so we can debate how funny they really are. Seriously. -- Stbalbach 15:43, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, Stbalbach. I chuckled reading it, because I have read excerpts from the book, other reviews (metacritic shows a 66 positive/100 reviews for this book), Queenan's review, and Jacobs' response Essay. It's not POV to note the content of the Essay to be a pointed tongue-in-cheek criticism of Queenan's vitriolic review. ju66l3r 19:38, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

It's clear that Jacobs was hurt by Queenan's review. He appears to have been somewhat obsessed by it, until he found some sort of closure by getting his rebuttal published. I think if Queenan, or anyone else, didn't like the book, they should say so, and the author should take it. When someone gets lots of good reviews they should be able to cope with a few bad ones! 82.46.181.57 (talk) 02:29, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

• Note: this topic was started by a now-blocked trolling user. Acalamari 03:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

smartest person in the world

The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World is the title of a book by Esquire editor A.J. Jacobs, published in 2004.

It recounts his experience of reading the entire Encyclopædia Britannica; ...

Have any studies been done to determine how smart (or stupid) he would have become if he'd read everything in Wikipedia instead? 67.117.130.181 10:30, 16 December 2006 (UTC)

I'm trying to persuade Mr. Jacobs to write a book about Wikipedia. Das Baz, aka Erudil 19:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC) By the time anyone finished reading the millions of articles in Wikipedia, she or he would have to start all over again, since everything would have been rewritten and edited. Das Baz, aka Erudil 17:40, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

Gaps in the Index

The Index to The Know-it-all has some serious gaps:

• Giordano Bruno, a great astronomer and philosopher, is discussed and quoted on pages 180-181, but not listed in the Index.
• Quotations in four languages - Esperanto, Gullah, Haitian Creole, and Hokan appear on page 229 of the book, but not in the Index.
• Nobel winner Professor Konrad Lorenz is mentioned on pages 345 and 365, but neither item is listed in the Index.
• The extraordinary posthumous trial and punishment of Pope Formosus is briefly recounted on page 260, but neither "Pope" nor "Formosus" appear in the Index.

Das Baz, aka Erudil 19:38, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Lack of References

At the end of the article there are claims that Isaac Asimov, Dr. Michael DeBakey, Richard Feynman, C. S. Forester and George Bernard Shaw have also read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica that are lacking in reference.

In fact i havn't found any mention of such a feat attributed to any of these people in any of their available online biographies.

Since these baseless claims has remained baseless for over a year now i see no reason why they shouldn't be deleted.--87.68.50.243 (talk) 07:59, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe it should be mentioned ...

... that being knowledgeable is not the same thing as being smart.

(In fact, there is very little overlap between the two words' meanings.)

So the title of the book misuses the word "smart".

This is definitely worth mentioning in the article. 2601:200:C082:2EA0:A808:5777:C905:6AE0 (talk) 01:57, 17 March 2024 (UTC)