[Article] What Will It Take to Solve the Voynich Manuscript?

[Torsten]

The idea that today someone is studying the Voynich manuscript without knowing of past efforts is therefore unreasonable.

Unfortunately, reality seems to be the opposite, as unreasonable as it may seem.

The majority of people that have proposed solutions in the past few years are unaware of the important statistical properties of the text, and of past research in general.

I have read numerous papers (not to mention blog posts) where it was stated that this was done in order to be able to have a 'fresh look' (or some similar terminology).

For scientific publications, knowledge of relevant past work in the area is an absolute prerequisite.

That someone is ignoring the research of others didn't mean that he or she is not aware that such research exists. Hannig for instance was able to refer to Kondrak and Hauer. Obviously he found their results interesting enough to include some reference. 

The Voynich manuscript was studied for over 100 years and the results of past researchers are available online. Today we have even access to the results of the NSA researchers. If you need a transliteration of the text, if you are interested in the entropy values, the word length distribution, the opinion of a linguist or how many scribes wrote the manuscript all you have to do is to start an online search for already published results and to check the validity of the results you find. It is also possible to use a forum like voynich.ninja to ask other researchers a questions. With other words there is already an international research group and every research can decide himself if he wants to join this group.