I had a typo in my headline to a post about Larry Sanger and Wikipedia — I misspelled “scientistic.” (It happens.) Sanger co-founded Wikipedia and has been “on it” about distortions regarding intelligent design by the online encyclopedia for a long time. The typo was caught by a colleague of mine … but not before it was also caught by Larry Sanger. On Twitter, he had this interesting recollection:
“Scientistic.” I stand behind this. In the early days, I fought several people tooth and nail on the question whether Wikipedia articles should dismiss intelligent design and other nonstandard scientific theories without a hearing. For several years my approach did prevail.
Alas, standing up against the forces of darkness and disinformation, Sanger was just one guy, even if an important one. Disinformation won out. As Sanger recently told Glenn Greenwald, “No encyclopedia to my knowledge has been as biased as Wikipedia has been. I mean, that’s saying something.”