Like the New York Times, Wikipedia is fairly reliable on uncontroversial subjects. Curious about boron or the capital of Wisconsin? Wikipedia's a lovely source. But in certain areas — particularly those which lean "left" religiously or politically, Wikipedia is absurdly (almost hilariously) biased.

For example, consider the entry on Fred Hoyle, famous astronomer and cosmologist. In his time, Hoyle was such an ardent atheist that he and Thomas Gold offered every argument they could to undermine the notion of the Big Bang. (Don't laugh: Even Einstein opposed the idea, and was rather reluctantly dragged into accepting it by his own equations.) In response to cosmological evidence, Hoyle eventually gave up atheism as intellectually untenable, becoming a theist (of some vague sort, one gathers).

Yet Wikipedia says, today (you always have to include that chronological qualifier, as new, and sometimes conflicting, editions can be produced hourly): "Ian Musgrave... argues that Hoyle's line of reasoning in this case incorporates a number of clear logical mistakes and omissions... As a result, this line of reasoning (which comes up frequently in discussions of Intelligent design vs. Evolution) is often referred to as Hoyle's Fallacy." A link to Hoyle's fallacy is then provided, which assures the curious reader, in no uncertain terms:

Hoyle's fallacy is a term for the flawed statistical analysis of Sir Fred Hoyle.

This is almost comically non-NPV (neutral point-of-view).

The "talk" (discussion) page admits that term actually originates from Richard Dawkins, and is almost never referenced in other reliable sources (nor even the cited source), yet the "Hoyle" article insists Hoyle's reasoning is "often" (no citation given, natch) referred to as "Hoyle's fallacy." The "talk" page also points out this "fallacy" isn't even a fallacy, using the correct sense of the word, but rather an argument Hoyle is wrong. (Ironically, the page itself is a fallacy, if one accepts its own definition of the word.) But there's no hint of that, either, in the main article.

The "fallacy" article lists several arguments against Hoyle's conclusion, a number of of which strike me as being clearly fallacious in themselves. But I'll leave the details of that for later: the point here is that these arguments are quoted, verbatim, from Ian Musgrave's web page. Who is Ian Musgrave and why is he an "authoritative", "reliable" source, such that his arguments, on a lonely web page, are give more weight than Hoyle's? We're not told.

(BTW: he's a Australian PhD and "Senior Lecturer" at U of Adelaide in pharmacology. That's nice, but it's odd that Wikipedia is obsessed, at some points, with reliable sources published in peer-reviewed journals, and, in others, is content to simply quote from some atheist's web page on the subject. As the Wikipedia page is little more than a character-for-character quote of Musgrave's summary, it would seem that is serves little purpose other than to promote some TalkOrigins web page into the realm of apparently incontestable fact.)

I've mentioned Hoyle's article because I happened to be looking at it at the moment, but I've seen the same obviously-non-NPV tone present (and the same phenomenon of having the most useful information hidden away on the discussion pages) on other articles related to Intelligent Design.

For example, the article on Michael Behe takes pains to assure us, in the introduction that "Behe's claims about the irreducible complexity of essential cellular structures are roundly rejected by the scientific community." What is "roundly"? Where is the citation proving this broad assertion? And: "Behe's ideas about intelligent design have been rejected by the scientific community..." Again: where are citations from reliable sources? The footnotes provided link to polemical articles. Can I freely make contrary assertions as long as I link to some ID web site?

(And of course, this is all in the introduction section. Richard Dawkins' philosophical arguments about God (his primary source of fame, it seems to me) are viewed with wide disrepute in the philosophical community — but you don't see any hints of that in his Wikipedia article at all, much less as the principal content of his introduction.)

One entry in the "Discussion" page hits the nail on the head for me:

Hi, I'm not a wikipedia guy, so I'll just state my thoughts here... I came here to learn about Behe's teachings, his biography, etc.... I have no stake in the Intelligent Design controversy. I'm a guy who checked out this article out of sheer curiosity. Meaning: I'm curious about who Behe is and why he's important. I already knew that he was controversial, and that the scientific community is overwhelmingly in favor in evolution. That's not why I came here. This should be an article *about* Michael Behe, right?

Consider, for a radical and patently unfair comparison, that even the article on Hitler (say) is devoted almost entirely to Hitler's life (ie., Hitler's beliefs, his actions, his legacy, etc.) and not the consensus on what a horrible person Hitler was. ID is pseudoscience, fine. Say that and move on. There are other pages devoted to that anyway. As it is, this article on Michael Behe reads like a hit piece.

Yep. (And what does it say that even an article on someone as universally reviled as Hitler can be accurately cited as receiving a more scholarly treatment?)

Similarly, the article on William Dembski chooses a mouth-open-while-talking picture as his main visual representation, and assures us, in the second paragraph:

The mainstream scientific community rejects his ideas, with many leading scientific and scientific education organizations including the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and National Science Teachers Association rejecting intelligent design, describing it as "not science", "lack[ing] scientific warrant" and "pseudoscience", and his work has been characterised by prominent mathematician David H. Wolpert as "written in jello".

Again, whatever one's position on these issues, it's kind of hilarious to see the Wikipedia introduction spend twice as much text attacking his ideas as simply stating his position. Neutral point of view? Not if you can count words and have any sense of "tone" at all.

For some reason, David Berlinski is spared the "tell them he's an idiot in the introduction" treatment, but the section describing his views on Intelligent Design currently contains:

- Three neutral sentences (one paragraph) describing Berlinski's views on ID and evolution
- Five sentence fragments listing a few selected objections from one Berlinski book

Versus:

- Two paragraphs describing Berlinski's associations (huh?)
- Six paragraphs of scathing prose from critics

Hey, but it's NPV because both views have been represented! We listed a few sentence fragments summarizing Berlinski's arguments, and then several paragraphs lumping him in with "global warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists." Guilt by association is quite a scholarly business here at Wikipedia!

Wikipedia's rebuttal is always: "Well, if you don't like an article you can change it", which is technically true, but meaningless: the fact that all the useful information and strong rebuttals are showing up on the "talk" pages (and are seen disappearing in "history") shows that those with the most time on their hands (and sometimes, those with the fewest scruples) tend to prevail.

Further, the fact that the Wikipedia staff prominently asserts (on the talk pages) that ID is pseudoscience indicates that Wikipedia itself is not NPV, but has decided, as a matter of editorial policy, that there is no scientific evidence of intelligent design in the universe, and thus the trashing is entirely appropriate.