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Wikipedia: Bad for ID, DI

By gregladen on November 29, 2007.

The blog Afarensis brings us an amusing yet at the same time disturbing discussion of the Discovery Institute's Casey Luskin concerns about the reliability of Wikipedia as a source of information for students.

This is hysterically funny because of the fact that Casey Luskin and all the others at the Discover Institute are a pack of bald faced liars.

Or is it simply the case that the Discovery Institute does not fare well on Wikipedia.

The Discovery Institute is a think tank based in Seattle, Washington, best known for its advocacy of intelligent design and its Teach the Controversy campaign to teach creationist beliefs in United States public high school science courses. A federal court, along with the majority of scientific organizations, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, say the Institute has manufactured the controversy they want to teach by promoting a false perception that evolution is "a theory in crisis" due to it being the subject of wide controversy and debate within the scientific community...

Or perhaps it is just that Intelligent Design does not fare well in the harsh light of The Wiki.

The unequivocal consensus in the scientific community is that intelligent design is not science.

One of the things Luskin claims on his Discovery Intitute post is that if you go to Wikipedia and look up Martin Luther King Jr. (Oh, MLK is Luskin's hero, by the way) that you find a bunch of White Supremesist stuff.

I looked at the MLK entry and could not find anything like this at all. Luskin's assertion is in accurate.

In the end, Luskin states:

Students should thus be forewarned about the dangers using Wikipedia as a primary source -- or even as a haven for secondary sources -- for information on controversial issues like intelligent design.

In truth, the Wikipedia entry on ID is actually pretty good. Of course, it is not a primary source. It is a Wikipedia entry and should be treated as such. The best source for information about Intelligent Design is probably the Science Blogosphere.

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By comparison, DI's entry on Conservapedia is:

The Discovery Institute is a Seattle-based conservative think tank. While the institute has multiple areas of focus, including economics, bioethics, and foreign policy, it is most well known for its role as one of the major proponents of intelligent design.

So on the most amenable wiki they have, they only get 40 neutral words? They don't even get labelled "principal proponent." No wonder they have an inferiority complex.

> The best source for information about Intelligent Design is probably the Science Blogosphere.

You mean entries like this that do little more then quoting other blogs and the wikipedia?

The "science blogosphere" usually just is a copy and paste of other blogs, with a few lines of comments added. In no way this entry adds information about ID. It just adds your opinion. Thanks. But it was not so interesting.