Wikipedia

From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written collaboratively by people from all around the world. The Wikipedia is arguably the first mainstream wiki encyclopedia and certainly the most well known of all wikis. It is a truly international effort and a testament to the success that can be achieved with the mediawiki software. Wikipedia reports having 13,000 active contributors working on over 1,800,000 articles in more than 100 languages.

From the Wikipedia website, it states;

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Because Wikipedia is an ongoing work to which anybody with Internet access can contribute, it differs from a paper-based reference source in some important ways. In particular, mature articles tend to be more comprehensive and balanced, while other (often fledgling) articles may still contain significant misinformation, unencyclopaedic content or vandalism. Users need to be aware of this in order to obtain valid information and avoid misinformation which has been recently added and not yet removed.

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Many of the CreationWiki authors have expressed frustration with Wikipedia. It is said that while Wikipedia claims to take a "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) position on topics and seems to follow it quite well for most issues, when it comes to creation science and intelligent design, it has a strong negative point of view. Sometimes this bias simply results from contributors who do not like or in some cases show a clear hatred for creationism, sadly this sentiment extends to the sysops as well. One example is the fact that they classify Creation science and Intelligent design as pseudosciences which is a standard anti-creation tactic.

Interwiki Linking

Wikipedia has been set up for Interwiki linking. A link like [[Wikipedia:Main Page]] will appear like this: Wikipedia:Main Page and redirect you to Wikipedia's Main Page. To Create a titled link, use a format like [[Wikipedia:Creationism|Creationism]], which will simply appear as: Creationism.

prefix	direction	usage example
wikipedia	http://wikipedia.org/wiki/	`[[wikipedia:Main Page]]`

Anticreation Bias on Wikipedia

An example of the systemic bias in Wikipedia was the vote to delete the article "Views of Creationists and mainstream scientists compared". Despite Wikipedia's NPOV policy, many voters felt free to vote to delete the article on the grounds that they considered creationism as pseudoscience or worse, rather than on the merits of the article itself. Some of the comments in support of the vote to delete were:

The title of the page is inherently wrong, as it suggests that creationism is a scientific view.
...comparing religious doctrine to scientific theory is comparing apples and oranges, and thus non-encyclopedic.
By opposing "creationism" to "mainstream science", the article title suggests that creationism is a scientific POV.
Creationism is not science.
Delete, since creationism is ultimately based on untestable religious beliefs...

Not only did these voters feel free to vote on the basis of their bias, no administrators felt the need to remind the voters that they should be voting on the merits of the article, not their personal opinion of creationism.

Furthermore, the contributor who proposed that the article be deleted—after he had vandalised the creationist views listed there—considered the Talk.Origins Archive to be "the most balanced treatment on the web to date"!

The Wikipedia previously had an article about CreationWiki, which has since been deleted. The article was typically found expressing the anti-creationist sentiment said to be found there and retained a clear POV criticism of CreationWiki. Subsequent articles about CreationWiki have been posted that were also rapidly deleted.

In April 2006 there was a proposal to delete the article, and the end result of the discussion (with ten votes to keep and seven to delete) was "No consensus (defaults to Keep)". However, another proposal to delete in August 2006 succeeded, with four votes to delete and two to merge to a separate article on Christian Wikis. However, that latter article was itself deleted in early November 2006.

The behavior clearly demonstrates the aforementioned anticreation views of the Wikipedia editors. It is also noteworthy that the Wikipedia editor who first recommended the deletion of the CreationWiki article is the self-proclaimed head of the Wikipedia Neutrality Project.

NPOV at Wikipedia would seem rather to mean they conform to the POV of the editors. Almost all conservative Christian institutions and individuals get a very bad press. The Trinity School of Apologetics and Theology reportedly had a long battle with them over numerous false reports published on their site -- in spite of documented evidence to the contrary. They were forced to contact the Trustees of the Wiki before the articles that contained slander and libel against them were finally removed.