There have been a couple of interesting articles recently on the Creation Ministries International website about internet censorship.
The first article, Wikipedia, looks at the anti-Christian bias in this go-to resource we all use and shows that it is not necessarily always the neutral source of truth we might think it is. There are a few extracts below…
The second article, What if CMI is censored?, looks at the potential future impact of internet giants clamping down on ‘fake news’ on those who hold unpopular views such as Biblical creation. This article ends with a challenge…
…are you using your reach on social media for all it’s worth? Sharing creation information on social media is one of the easiest ways to let your friends and family know about this life-changing information.
Both of these articles are well worth a read. No doubt Wikipedia is great for lots of things, but it’s easy to forget that we live in a hostile world full of the Devil’s lies. We need to be on our guard all the time and remember that the Bible is the only real source of truth – ‘thy word is
Here are a few extracts from the Wikipedia article.
Controversial
“Since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has been a controversial website, plagued with problems, the greatest of which is the serious concern of biased and inaccurate content. This is no small problem for the internet at
Bias
“Wikipedia is governed by various guidelines which are supposed to regulate how articles are administered on the site. According to their guideline called ‘Neutral point of view’,
All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.
Already you can see a potential here for bias since we have subjective terms such as “significant” and “reliable” being used. Who gets to determine what constitutes significant or reliable? Well, the editors themselves, as it turns out—that means you, me, and literally anyone with a computer who knows how to edit Wikipedia. But here’s the catch: anyone can also revert any changes made by another editor. This means ultimately that articles represent a ‘consensus’. This would be bad enough in itself, since we know that truth is not decided by majority vote, and ‘consensus science’ is anti-science. But it is worse than it seems on the surface, since most Wikipedia articles are not being watched or edited by a very large number of people. Here, the ‘consensus’ is really only the agreement of a relative few people who, by chance, happen to be the only ones monitoring a given page at a given time. This means that the less popular a page is, the more likely it is to contain errors and bias, or, in the words of wiki expert Alexander Halavais, “The high-traffic areas are going to be the cleanest.”
Even high-traffic areas, though, are not going to be free of bias if the topic is of a controversial or contentious nature. Since Wikipedia is essentially mob-rule applied to encyclopedia content, the prevailing view of the mob is going to determine the bias of the articles. It is naïve to expect people to police themselves when dealing with topics they are averse to, like biblical creation.”
Misrepresentation
“This all adds up to a stark and sad reality: Wikipedia is very likely to be hopelessly, terribly unbalanced in articles dealing with God, religion and creation science. In digging through some relevant pages, I found some really cringe-worthy, egregious examples of this. In the Wikipedia guidelines section on ‘Fringe theories’, it says this:
Pseudoscience usually relies on attacking mainstream scientific theories and methodology while lacking a critical discourse itself (as is common among Biblical creationists) [emphasis mine]
They didn’t even attempt to hold back, claiming that creationism is pseudoscience. Creationists certainly do not lack a critical discourse; all the articles on this site, for example, undergo a peer review process. In addition, creationists publish in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of
Wikipedia openly and blatantly classifies biblical creationism as ‘pseudoscience’:
Creation science is a pseudoscientific attempt to map the Bible into scientific facts. It is viewed by professional biologists as unscholarly, and even as a dishonest and misguided sham, with extremely harmful educational consequences.
The level of bias and misrepresentation here is almost beyond words. It is sad that this is coming from what may be the internet’s most-used source of information, but this is the reality we must face in the 21st century. The wording here implies there is a total lack of any professional scientists who support and engage in creation science—a claim which is flat out wrong.”
Silencing Dissent
“It has been documented time and again that there is a battle going on in academia and in the media to attempt to silence all dissent against Darwinism. Because Wikipedia is so driven by consensus (rule of the majority a.k.a. mob rule), it suffers from all the problems that such systems of governance typically do, such as the ‘tyranny of the majority’, where the majority acts against the interests of minority groups.
The problems at Wikipedia are only symptomatic of a larger struggle that has been going on much longer than Wikipedia has been around. With God’s help, let us do our part to represent and defend the truth of the Bible and of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world, in every medium possible.”
Paul Price, 31/07/2018, creation.com/wikipedia
[A00087 – 03/09/2018]
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