Human Achievement Hour and Wikipedia politics

Liberal Wikipedia editors are at it again. This time, they're repeatedly deleting an article about Human Achievement Hour, the pro-Man counterpoint to the so-called "Earth Hour." This is the kind of thing that keeps me from letting my students cite Wikipedia as a source. Since I looked it up, it's been deleted, while I had the page open.

More on Wikipedia

Heh, heh, heh...I just came across this funny article about Wikipedia and accuracy. I especially enjoyed the author's response to a couple of readers who'd snidely (reasonable in principle, but it was snide in tone) suggested comparing Wikipedia and Britannica in the error rate per word, rather than per article:

Let's put to this to the test.
Here's a hypothetical entry, containing two serious errors.

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1462 and published the Theory of Relativity.

We can see that it is 13 words long: an "error rate" of one every 6.5 words.
Now here's a longer version.

Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1462.
Badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger snake
He published the Theory of Relativity.

This version is 114 words long, and contains only 2 errors - an "error rate" of one every 57 words. That's almost nine times more accurate - and very much proves Barry and Ernest correct.
We unreservedly apologize, and once again, must hail the power of "collective intelligence".

My rising frustration with Wikipedia

It came to my attention this week that there were some problems with the Wikipedia entry on a University of Pittsburgh physicist, David Snoke. I've linked to the Discussion page, rather than the entry itself, to demonstrate the bile and bad behavior that goes on in the process of making an "encyclopedia" entry at this site. It's disgusting.

Snoke is a respected condensed-matter physicist, albeit one who probably wouldn't have gotten a Wikipedia entry (well, except he is in Who's Who). The entry was created because of an article he co-authored on complexity in protein evolution. It has implications for intelligent design, and there's where the problems have come up.

The page has been run by anti-ID people and had for a while been worded more like a polemic against Snoke. Snoke has tried to correct some of it, but much of what he adds keeps getting deleted by his antagonists. I have never done any Wikipedia editing, just because I haven't felt like spending the time it seems to take, but this would be something worth contributing to, if I did.

I'm not convinced by ID, but it deserves a more respectful hearing than it's getting in this excuse for an encyclopedia. I'm glad that at my institution, we're able to have debates on it amongst the faculty, without this kind of behavior.