I'm not at all surprised in the direction Windschuttle is taking Quadrant.

Under his 'editorialship', he has given a springboard for people like David Evans and Bob Carter to publish unsubstantiated guff that would not get past the first editorial base in scientific journals, so why is this latest piece any more of a surprise?

Some authors (not to the exclusion of journalists) are not honest in their submissions but because of their standing in the public domain, they can (and do) misuse their status to distort or misrepresent the truth ... for their own agenda.

An argument could be put that the editor should have some accountability in filtering the guff out, but if they don't want to (for whatever reason) there is little the readership can do for redress, particularly if they agree with the guff that is espoused.

I have not read the Hoax. But the article raises a number of points that should be of concern to OLO.
One of the reasons that Windschuttle is held in some opprobrium by historians is that far from exposing the errors of his colleagues he has a tendency to ignore any evidence about Australia's past that throw doubt on his preferred position.
You make the point that science reporting in Australia is below par. Yet the Domain contributes to that by publishing Jennifer Marohasy on a daily basis. Like Windschuttle she too, studiously avoids any reference to evidence that may throw doubt on her preferred position. (I am sure you could get a person who supports climate change to write a daily blog that simply selectively quotes the evidence in favour of climate change; either way you would not be contributing to the standard of scientific reporting.)
I am assuming Mally-p's question was tongue in cheek. Nonetheless the very fact that it can be made highlights the awe in which most people seem to hold published views. Published views can be wrong. It is a sobering thought that Galileo probably would not have been published had he relied on peer review.
As far as OLO is concerned the pieces that are presented under the banner of OLO are written by people who presumably have done some thinking about a topic and are willing to open that thinking to public scrutiny. the same goes for the Forum. I assume that readers understand those rules and abide by them.
The Domain is another matter. If those pieces are written by sponsors of the journal then fair enough but put a disclaimer in to that effect.
Otherwise I doubt the wisdom of giving a daily forum to particular individuals whose views are of as much merit as any other contributor to OLO - lets not put some people on a pedestal. John Töns

John, I think you're making a mistake about the nature of The Domain. It is a blog aggregator. The blogs that are there are part of a network that we have put together and includes a number of blogs with quite different, and often opposed, points of view. It's as comprehensive as we can make it, but given the number of blogs out there with quality it is not possible to be completely comprehensive.

I don't think Marohasy is always right, but I don't think she is always wrong, and I think she is more right than wrong. She has some significant coups to her name. If a quality blog came along from the other direction and fitted our demographic we'd be happy to negotiate with them.

I'd be interested in your examples of Windschuttle deliberately ignoring evidence that doesn't suit his case. Hard to have an argument about this in the abstract.

I avoided saying that Windschuttle deliberately ignored counter evidence - I used the term "studiously" But even that may be misleading. I suspect that what is going on is that we often cannot see what we assume will not be there. For a particular example: The fabrication of Aboriginal History is a good starting point.
As for an alternative blog to Marohasy - Monbiot is a good counterpoint.
My objection to Jennifer's work is that it is unscientific. The best argument against her posts was posted by David Young with regard to his discussion of Chaos Theory. In essence it accounted for the conflicting data sets that we get with respect to climate change.
Perhaps you could consider reviewing the domain's contributors perhaps along the line of how "signandsight.com" <newsletter@signandsight.com>
manages its selection. A review of International Ezines could be an improvement.

Graham, I like your insight on blogging as tribal behaviour, and there is obviously a lot of tribalism in the case of this Windschuttle hoax. What I think you overlook is the (stylistic) way that Windschuttle has made so many of his arguments in the history wars -- and more generally in the culture wars, if you follow his prolific written output.

Windschuttle often argues the ad hominem denunciation line. His method is typically to begin with disputes about small and/or incidental details -- especially the footnotes -- and use those to bring the work and its author into question overall. It is a casuist approach to the truth: pedantic (which has its place) and ungenerous (which is always a failing).

This hoax has resonance because its line of attack is those small and incidental details, the footnotes, with which Windschuttle has sought to recast so much excellent and important historical work as trash. It set him up to fail his own well-established test of unimagination. I hope he learns from it.

Q&A, you are being unfair to Windschuttle. While he has published unsubstantiated guff by Bob Carter, he hasn't published anything by David Evans. It's OLO that publishes the unsubstantiated guff by David Evans.