So I'm reading Senator Rick Santorum's inane editorial about teaching evolution, and I open a new browser window and go to Wikipedia to look up their entry on "Theory".

And something really bizarre happens.

I'm reading this section:

Often the statement "Well, it's just a theory," is used to dismiss controversial theories such as evolution, but this is largely due to confusion between the scientific use of the word theory and its more informal use as a synonym for "speculation" or "conjecture." In science, a body of descriptions of knowledge is usually only called a theory once it has a firm empirical basis, i.e., it

1. is consistent with pre-existing theory to the extent that the pre-existing theory was experimentally verified, though it will often show pre-existing theory to be wrong in an exact sense,
2. is supported by many strands of evidence rather than a single foundation, ensuring that it probably is a good approximation if not totally correct,
3. has survived many critical real world tests that could have proven it false,
4. makes predictions that might someday be used to disprove the theory, and
5. is one of the best known explanations, in the sense of Occam's Razor, of the infinite variety of alternative explanations for the same data.

This is true of such established theories as evolution, creation, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics (with minimal interpretation), plate tectonics, etc.

My head snaps back at that last line, and the word "creation". Huh? I think.

So some creationist jagoff has inserted "creation", so I click on History to see who made the last edit. As I do that, it says the last edit was made about 30 seconds ago, and that the current version reads:

This is true of such established theories as evolution, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics (with minimal interpretation), plate tectonics, etc.

So either the moderator or another heads-up reader made the fix, while I was reading the article! Interesting.

I have no idea whether this occurs on an hourly basis, or what. There may very well be back and forth revisions of this entry and others constantly. A while back I mentioned that some controversial entries had tighter security than others. It would be a shame for them to have to lock this entry down tighter because of reactionary assholes, but I'd be interested to learn more about the history of this entry.