A Measure of the Weight of ACCG Numismatic Wannabe Scholarship

I have several times suggested that dealer Dave Welsh could far more profitably use his time sharing his, reportedly, polymathic knowledge of numismatics with the world than his attacks on others, rants on flatulence, Nazis and other such topics. He seems to have decided to have a go, by creating a Wikipedia page about coins. It is called "classical coins". The only reason I can see for that is that this is the name of his own company, to which said page gives multiple links and not much else.

Mr Welsh announced his ambition for his page to "become the definitive online treatment of the subject", and he would like other Wikipedians to join in with making it so. The trouble is, the whole exercise is  really a bit pointless. Welsh really should have done a bit of research and planning beforehand. If he'd done that, he'd have discovered that there is already a perfectly acceptable Wikipedia page of Ancient Greek coins, one on Roman currency (see here too) and Byzantine coins (see here). No reason is offered for duplicating them, no links are given to them, and much of the material Mr Welsh presents is duplicated elsewhere in Wikipedia (the overview of Roman history for example). There is also a problem defining the scope of the subject, the Wikipedia article describing the "Classical World" (ie where the coins he discusses come from) does not include the Byzantine world (see also here). Given the ACCG's interest in the coinage of Italy, I am surprised to find no mention of Etruscan coins in Mr Welsh's attempted encyclopaedic coverage.

There is a paucity of links to useful online resources. Instead of sending readers to his own trade webpage summarising Head's Historia Numorum, a Manual of Greek Numismatics, he could send them to the electronic version (put together by Ed Snible and others).   There is a long list of books none of which have inline citations in the text to indicate which statements they are being used to support. They are thus just a random selection, unrelated to the text itself - also containing books on subjects from beyond the scope of the article (Bactrian, Sasanian, Parthian, Kushan).

The coverage is also very weak. There is nothing on the manufacture of these objects, nor different theories on their function (for example the use of the early coins, and their use outside the areas where they primarily circulated, such as Roman coins here in barbaricum). When you turn to, for example, the section on coins of the Roman Empire, we find the coins hardly mentioned at all. There is a potted and chatty 'kings and battles' political history of the Roman Empire, with absolutely no hyperlinks in it to other Wikipedia articles, one would have thought what this text should cover instead would be economic history, and in particular what numismatics can tell us about that.

Welsh reveals his underlying purpose:

Some archaeologists who oppose collecting [sic - PMB] have dismissed coin collecting as mere institutionalized [sic - PMB] acquisitiveness, without taking the trouble to learn anything [sic - PMB] about the subject. In the present confrontation between collecting and archaeology, it will be valuable to have an informative and impressive presentation of the inherent value and contributions of ancient numismatics.

It would wouldn't it? But I am afraid there is little hope that what Mr Welsh has cut and pasted from a commercial website fits the bill. In addition I suspect Mr Welsh's approach to coins is well-revealed by this passage, somewhat out of place in such an article, one would have thought:

An online tour of Roman coinage can be found here. It begins with the massive cast bronze coins of the early Republic, continuing via the navigation arrows through the denarius coinage to the Imperatorial period, and then to the coinage of the Roman Empire. Images of the leading personalities of the Republic and the Imperatorial period are presented, inclcuding an image of every Roman emperor from Augustus Caesar (27 BC) to Romulus Augustus (476 AD), together with a brief historical overview of each period or reign.

In other words the coins are here used as quaint (collectable) illustrations of a known ('kings and battles') history, rather than as a source of evidence of any other kind of enquiry into the past. This is precisely where we began this discussion.

Now, why do the ACCG not stop messing around? Obviously the time is well overdue for them to get their collective several thousand heads together and produce that textbook of theory, practice and methodology of  'heap-of-decontextualised-coins-on-a-table-bought-no-questions-asked-and-of-no-known-origin' numismatics the world is waiting for. How difficult for them can that be?