Conservapedia

From Conservapedia

Revision as of 19:33, 22 February 2012

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Conservapedia is a deceitful, heavily biased and willfully ignorant wiki-based blog project masquerading as a encyclopedia. It is written from a far right and extremist Christian point of view. It is better viewed as an online guide to understanding how a particular segment of the American fundamentalist Christian right "thinks" than as an actual encyclopedia, as the site's administrators see liberals, atheists, and homosexuals (along with whoever the "bête noire du jour" is, like Muslims) as being the cause of all society's ills. Their attacks on these groups are fueled by traditionalism and jingoistic pro-Americanism, and often make liberal use of ad hominem. This political alignment automatically considers somebody a liberal, should they fall anywhere on the left of Adolf Hitler. The site was founded on 21 November 2006 by Andrew Schlafly, spawn of professional "pro-family" activist Phyllis Schlafly, in an attempt to offset what he perceived as an liberal liberal bias at Wikipedia. Conservapedia's goal is to try to create a version of Wikipedia that has a conservative bias, and a conservative version of the bible.

Since then...

Currently, Conservapedia ("CP") is managed by Aschlafly and a group of homeschooled teenagers known as "The Panel". While there is a list of Conservapedia Commandments, they seem to be mostly honored in the breach, and their basic policy seems to be banning people for ideological differences, attempts at humor, or backtalking to them. The latest expansion on this is the "Scorched Earth Editing Policy", in which after banning someone, they undo all of that person's recent edits, just to make certain the filthy heretic doesn't feel like trying to get back on to vandalize the site further by posting more facts the sysops don't agree with. Users there have been warned not to delete content on threat of banning.

Theology

Conservapedia holds a "American, Christian Point of View". What this means exactly, is up for debate. Some core attributes appear to be:

• A Young Earth Creationist Viewpoint
• There is a homosexual plot out there to homosexualize america!
• Global warming denialism
• Anti Islam
• Crackpot conspiracy theories
• Pro Intelligent Design
• Anti-Vaccines
• Anti Sex Ed
• Pro unregulated guns (Sounds real smart, if you consider that the average Conservapedian believes in corporal punishment for "obscenity" -read homosexuality)
• Anti Minimum Wage
• Pro Victorian England working conditions
• Anti-CERN
• Anti-Physics

Reactions to Conservapedia

Much speculation has been made about Conservapedia's relative impact on both the internet and political culture. Whilst Schlafly claims that "liberal" sites are on the decline, as demonstrated by the fact The Social Network didn't win the Academy Award it was nominated for, conservative websites, such as Conservapedia, are surging ahead. Andrew Schlafly routinely states that Conservapedia gets lots of page views, and thus believes that people are using it as the encyclopedia it pretends to be. He is largely basing his page view statistics on the internal statistics of the MediaWiki software. However, these statistics are often misleading as they make no distinction between types of traffic, and can be easily manipulated by clickbots. Conservapedia routinely deletes and recreates articles that have inflated page view statistics as reported by the MediaWiki software, but the act of deletion alone confirms that the statistics have been manipulated and are thus unreliable. On top of this, Schlafly also says Wikipedia is deceitful for not using MediaWiki's statistics, even when these statistics are clearly unreliable and don't work in Wikimedia's heavily cached infrastructure anyway. To give you an idea of what people are actually thinking about Conservapedia, googling Conservapedia yields more than half a million hits, though many are quite dubious. Ignoring the first three hits (which are for the site itself) nearly all the top results on google criticize or mock Conservapedia, with the exception, ironically, on listing #4, Wikipedia, which gives it about as fair an entry as one could hope for.