Over at The Questionable Authority, we find that the Intelligent Design crowd has been tinkering with Wikipedia for propaganda purposes.

Following the Dover trial, which the intelligent design forces lost embarrassingly, the Discovery Institute and its friends have been covering their losses by pretending Judge Jones is an activist judge (actually, he is a conservative Lutheran appointed by George W. Bush and has no track record of “judicial activism”), by pretending the judge overreached his jurisdiction by finding that intelligent design wasn’t science (despite the fact that both the plaintiff and the defence asked for this subject to be ruled on and presented evidence pertinent to it), by claiming that pro-evolution expert witness Jeffrey Shallit was excluded from testifying (in fact, Shallit was a rebuttal witness to William Dembski; on seeing that Shallit would be critiquing his testimony, Dembski withdrew from the case, whereupon all sides agreed that Shallit would not need to appear if Dembski didn’t).

Thus far, the ID apologists have limited themselves to their own blogs and websites, which are naturally read mostly by like-minded people. But now they have discovered the power of Wikipedia.

An ID “friend” (according to William Dembski) added the book Of Pandas and People to Wikipedia’s list of banned books. But Of Pandas and People was never a part of the school curriculum and the Dover case made no recommendation to remove it from libraries. How exactly was it banned? Well, the school board wasn’t allowed to force it onto the biology curriculum. By that standard, Origin of the Species is also a banned book, and so are all of Richard Dawkins’s books, not to mention genuinely controversial biology books such as Steve Pinker’s The Blank Slate. By the “not on the curriculum” standard, 100% of all books have been “banned” somewhere.

Clearly this has nothing to do with truthful representation, but with propaganda. The entry was soon removed by another Wikipedia user, sparking off a discussion about what should and shouldn’t belong on the list.

I’m thinking of adding “Banned in Dover” to the cover of my next book.