The ID Report

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, there have been some serious problems with widely consulted Wikipedia entries on major intelligent design figures that read like poison pen letters. The trouble is, anyone can edit a Wiki entry. This problem is hardly likely to be confined to the intelligent design controversy, as a recent scandal and ban on school use has spotlighted.

As Financial Times put it, Wikipedia's celebrated "openness" has

drawn charges of unreliability and left it vulnerable to disputes between people with opposing views, particularly on politically sensitive topics.

That's a polite way of putting it, for sure. One of ID math guy WIlliam Dembski's colleagues at Uncommon Descent went to a good deal of trouble to ascertain facts and post a long correct entry. But it could go corrupt again as long as anyone with a grudge can edit it. So if it doesn't smell right at certain points, that's probably why.

Recently, I wrote to a friend regarding some bad entries for Bill Dembski:

The current Wiki entry would euthanize about forty squirrels in my back alley, two dozen skunks, four foxes, and eighteen full size raccoons. Maybe a coyote as well. And three dozen tomcats and 200 rats.

As a textbook editor, one of my functions was "bias reviewer" - specifically, it was my job to flag tendentious material. But Wikipedia has no such oversight. Now, a founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, is bringing out a competitor that will feature traditional control devices like editors. As he says,

The latest articles don't represent a consensus view – they tend to become what the most persistent 'posters' say.

Yes, exactly. And people with a grudge, for whatever reason, will be far more persistent than people who just want to set down some information and go live their life and be happy.

Apparently, Sanger left after a year, frustrated by the failure of Wkipedia to grasp the need for qualified editors.

Is ID an unusual case? Probably not. Teachers and professors should not, in my view, encourage students to use Wikipedia entries at this point. Many students are not nearly skilled enough to detect even the most obvious bias and the teacher cannot be everywhere and know everything.

Jimmy Wales at Wikipedia had a great idea - in theory. In practice, allowing malicious posters to publish distorted accounts, presumably on the theory that the friends of the maligned will rush to correct them, is simply irresponsible. Entirely lost to view is that the system should benefit the user, not the poster - and the user just wants a neutral account of ideas and events. We traditional editors always knew that.

Incidentally, I have reason to believe that the competitor encyclopedia will feature a supervised entry on the intelligent design controversy written by a knowledgeable insider. People who want to launch personal attacks on the ID guys are still free to do so, of course, but not to pretend that they are encyclopedia entries.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of the forthcoming The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).