Is the Wikipedia page on Intelligent Design biased?

It occurs to me that those complaining about the contents of the Wikipedia Intelligent Design article fail to understand that Wikipedia is not just an online encyclopedia, it is also a set of processes, including rules, that allows thousands of volunteers, most of whom are anonymous, many of whom have wildly divergent viewpoints, to work together to produce this encyclopedia.

The people complaining about the ID article seem to have the idea that there’s some sort of magic wand that can be waved to change the article. There isn’t. The article is the result of applying the aforementioned rules and processes to the topic. Given that I can testify, at first hand, that this article’s compliance with those rules has been scrutinised within an inch of its life (as is the case of most articles on high-profile controversial topics), it is highly unlikely that the article can be changed significantly without first changing the rules (probably substantially). Changing those rules (even assuming you can get the changes agreed to) would potentially affect every article on Wikipedia.

An example of an online encyclopedia with different rules is Conservapedia (linked to above). If you are Andrew Schlafly, you have no problem getting any Conservapedia article to say anything you like. You will however have trouble (i) finding nearly as many volunteers as Wikipedia has, & (ii) stopping people from sniggering whenever your encyclopedia is mentioned.

In such a project, scale and control are two mutually-limiting objectives.

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