Wikipedia Bias on Religion: Creationism vs. Science—How Wikipedia Assumed the Role of Arbiter of Faith

The Wikipedia article on “Creationism” is a prime example of Wikipedia’s bias against and denigration of religious beliefs. It snidely describes “creationism” as “a literal or quasi-literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis.”

It continues: “The term creationism most often refers to belief in special creation: the claim that the universe and lifeforms were created as they exist today by divine action and that the only true explanations are those which are compatible with a Christian fundamentalist literal interpretation of the creation myth found in the Bible‘s Genesis creation narrative,” going so far as to call the belief in intelligent design of the Young Creationists a pseudoscience.

With this, they dismiss the beliefs of those who, based on survey, hold Creationism as a religious belief, including:

• 38 percent of Americans who responded to a 2017 survey that they believe in creationism
• 12 percent of UK respondents to a University of Birmingham survey in 2023
• 47% of Brazilians
• 56% of South Africans
• 3% of Australians, and
• 21% of Canadians

This further extrapolates to an estimated 20% to 30% of the world’s population who hold creationist beliefs: Approximately 1.6 billion people. ​

A peer-reviewed article published on Taylor & Francis Online by René Königtitled WIKIPEDIA: Between lay participation and elite knowledge representation describes how Wikipedia policies and organization favor the political or ideological beliefs of influential editors and admins.

According to the abstract of the paper, “This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia’s talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed.”

“On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledge should be represented in the Wikipedia entry.

“NPOV [the Wikipedia policy requiring editors to edit from a Neutral Point of View]

“The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies.”

Creation.com, the website of Creation Ministries International, a group of non-profit ministries that disseminates the Gospel, published an article titled “Wikipedia: A dubious source, but a powerful tool for suppressing dissent”

The author points out: “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….”

“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 21^st century. The wording here implies a total lack of professional scientists who support and engage in creation science—a claim which is flat out wrong.”

The author encourages Christians to “engage themselves in the debate online by taking part in the editing of Wikipedia articles to remove clear instances of bias.”

Yet Wikipedia protects its right to communicate its truth at the expense of the beliefs of others, as this article goes on to describe.

“For my part, I raised a fuss at Wikipedia over Jonathan Sarfati’s biographical page [Sarfati is an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist who believes in creationism], including a defamatory quote from Eugenie Scott calling Refuting Evolution 2 [an article by Sarfati] a ‘crude piece of propaganda.’ To make a long story short, I wound up getting banned indefinitely on that account, and one of the Wikipedia editors had this to say (a clear admission of purposeful defamation and discrimination):

“There is zero chance that Wikipedia will ever treat pseudoscientists who believe that everything was created in 7 literal days 10,000 years ago the same way we treat the actual scientists — astronomers, physicists, geologists, paleontologists, etc. — who have solid evidence that the earth is much, much older.”

How do the admins such as David Gerard act with such impunity? And what can be done to reform Wikipedia so its representation of religion is actually balanced, accurate and fair?

World Religion News invites anyone knowing of any instances of Wikipedia anti-religious bias to submit their data or article for publication. Editors will review submissions and will publish those that conform to World Religion News guidelines.