Robert Dale McHenry (born April 30, 1945)[1] is an American editor, encyclopedist, philanthropist and writer.
[1] McHenry believes that Britannica failed to exploit its early advantages in the market for electronic encyclopedias.
The sales personnel earned commissions from door-to-door selling of the print encyclopedias, which McHenry believes led to decisions about the distribution and pricing of the electronic products, being driven by the desires of the sales personnel, rather than market conditions and customer expectations.
McHenry had little respect for their achievement, which he believed to be the result of, not only large resources and wide market reach, but a "casual disregard for quality work".
[7] During 2002 and 2003, McHenry worked part-time in a used-book store,[8][9] and for a company producing Internet content-filtering software.
McHenry has argued that ID is not a theory in the scientific meaning of the word, because it is not based on evidence, it does not generate predictions, and thus cannot be tested.
[13] He has described ID as anti-science, because it begins with a conclusion, that some unknown things are unknowable, which is then supported by selected evidence.
McHenry's Second Law states that the flow of 'information' expands to fill any available channel, while actual knowledge remains scarce and available only to those willing to work at it.
[20] In November 2004, McHenry wrote an article for Tech Central Station (later renamed TCS Daily) in which he criticized Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Belief in the ability of Wikipedia to succeed, he argued, required a faith that "some unspecified quasi-Darwinian process will assure that those writings and editings by contributors of greatest expertise will survive".
A secondary criticism was that editors were being self-indulgent, because they spent time on minor alterations while leaving important factual inaccuracies in place, and thus were disregarding the needs of the readers.