I had pointed out, time and again, that they had no reliable source to assert that those first 100 scientists (who included Tour, Skell, Picard, and
even Berlinski) were either dissenters from Darwinism or anti-evolution or supporters of ID. There simply wasn't a shred of evidence anywhere (including on the DI's own carefully spun PR pages) to support the view that those editors stubbornly insisted were facts on the ground. For the life of me, I couldn't fathom what purpose could be served by including such absurdly false and defamatory content in those BLPs and compounding it by making it the dominant
WP:Coatrack content in violation of
WP:NPOV (which would have included the analysis by Skip Evans of the NCSE, who was Filll's hero in the fight against the DI's misleading presentation of the petition and its interpretation). To my mind, they were in
willful disregard of the patently evident truth, as demonstrated by a sober and objective examination of their own sources.
Ken Chang might well have
thought that the 2006 website, DissentFromDarwin.Org was "anti-evolution" (even though the phrase never appears on the DI's website and nowhere in the
text of his own NYT article). But even so, his personal opinion (as expressed in that private E-Mail) hardly elevates that
personal point of view to an uncontestable {fact}. Picard posted on WP her contrary view that the controversial headline was skewed that way "to sell more newspapers". Chang never said who wrote the headline for that article. (Very likely he wouldn't have remembered after a year and a half.)
The
definitive primary source was the facsimile of the original anti-PBS ad, which exhibits the 32-word statement in a grey box with 100 names, below a headline and advertising copy that were clearly crafted expressly for that ad.
Filll's position that it was up to each of those 100 scientists to publicly refute the misrepresentations of Wikipedia was absurd. And even when several of the aggrieved scientists did that, the controlling editors
still left the misbegotten content in the articles and BLPs.