This probably happens because most[1] ID proponents are, in your own words, “amateurs and dilettantes, writing about subjects in which they have zero academic training.”
You say you don’t trust Wikipedia for this reason, yet you seem perennially horrified that others demonstrate that ID proponents similar lack of expertise leads them to make frequent and egregious errors.
The amusing thing is that Wikipedia is fully aware that the vast majority of its editors are not experts in the fields they are writing about, and so sets policies and guidelines to compensate for this – most notably WP:NOR and WP:V. The result is, for articles that are subject to a reasonably high level of scrutiny, a reasonably good level of quality (obscure articles are often of much lower quality however).
(The alternative, an online encyclopedia written solely “by invited or approved expert authors” has already been tried – it’s called Scholarpedia – but as the relatively tiny number of articles it has (1,804) demonstrates, the model doesn’t scale nearly so well.)
ID has no such checks and balances in place, which results in the mix of lies, half-truths, and misrepresented and cherry-picked data we all know and love – or in your own words, “riddled with error all through”.
Buggs himself would seem to be a potential exception to this in that he may have sufficient expertise such that he should know better. ↩︎