I'm not sure if it's Ars's writeup or the flavor of the project, but it seemed to have a sort of distasteful / desperate air of, "ugh, noobs on the internet writing crap, make way for the REAL authorities pls". (I'm even in academia myself and sort of cringe at that, because it's pretty much the stereotype of the condescending academic.)<p>It seems more likely to be used as just a literature-search aid by students, though. At $300, no normal people are actually going to use it instead of Wikipedia or Google, and probably most non-student academics will continue to use Google Scholar or other deeper searches.<p>One thing that would be interesting is if it grows into a good enough set of annotated bibliographies that researchers would find it valuable too. There are a lot of areas without a good recent survey article in them, so something like this at least listing all the major work in the area would be useful to scan.<p>But: isn't it sort of ominous to say that the "politicized work of sorting and sifting the information has already been done for users"? It seems that the cases where something's politicized are exactly those where I'd rather have a Wikipedia-style smorgasbord summarizing all the opinions (along with an accurate summary of who holds them and how mainstream those people are), rather than a carefully sifted list of the Correct opinions. But I could see that it might be useful if you were an undergrad just looking for a reference, and wanting it not to be a fringe one.