Kim van der Linde wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
Well, to some degree, there are legitimate reasons for using consensus: even within experts in the field, there often is not yet full agreement on the validity of newly developing science or technology.
Science works on arguments. Not by popular vote (Intelligent design and creations would be true in that case!). It is not consensus what is important, but the description of all relevant point-of-views based on their relative scientific importance based on scientific sources. To much is based on popular POV-sources, or pieced together quote mining.
No, I can say quite confidently, as a scientist active in academic publishing, that when reviewing a field (which is what encyclopedia articles are), science works on consensus, unless you are specifically writing a "critical review" unapologetically from a particular point of view. If you're claiming to be writing a review article that fairly represents the current state of the string-theory debate, for example, you must write a consensus article that represents all major camps. If you write an article representing your view of the "truth", then it isn't a review article representing an accurate consensus about the current state of the debate, so must be labelled as something else.
The only difference from your creationism/intelligent-design example is that review articles generally review controversies *within* a specific field rather than across or outside of them. Encyclopedia articles, of course, must take a broader view, and review the general state of debate among society at large---including between scientific fields, between scientific and humanities fields, and between academics and non-academics. The point is not to get at "truth", but to present a fair summary of the current state of the debate.
If anything, highly focused specialists are a major enemy of that endeavor, because many tend to see their view as the "right" view and hamper writing broad summaries---for example, a statistician who thinks all artificial intelligence is either statistics, badly done statistics, or crap.
I have my own opinions on many areas I'm an expert in, but I hardly object that Wikipedia doesn't document the truth as I see it, since that isn't its job.
-Mark