Wikipedia entry on Prayer

I edited an entry of the Wikipedia for the first time today. I had looked up “prayer” and found the definition to be as follows:

“Prayer is the act of communicating with a god or spirit for the purpose of worship or petition.”

This definition immediately jarred with me since I consider it to commit the “fallacy of many questions” by assuming the existence of a god with whom one can successfully communicate. The existence of such an entity is course by no means a certainty and is even arguably highly unlikely (q.v. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins). I therefore suggested the edit:

“Prayer is the act of attempting to communicate with a god or spirit for the purpose of worship or petition.”

I guess this essentially hinges on one’s understanding of the word “communicate”, but if you review the discussion page for the article you will see that I was unable to make any headway and my edits were removed. One contributor was a devout Christian who even stated that “clarity and simplicity are more important than neutrality”. This was stated despite the two not being mutually exclusive and the article remaining in breach of the Wikipedia’s own guidelines.

If anyone takes the same view as me on this issue they can always join the debate there and try to push the change through (you just need to register and you can edit). But be warned that another believer (or even an appeasing atheist, as I found there) might always come along and alter it again. To me this incident showed that the democratic nature of the Wikipedia is not always enough to ensure adherence even to its own guidelines – least of all where religion is involved.