A Storehouse of Knowledge

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A Storehouse of Knowledge (also known as aSK[1]) is an open editing[2], punk rock and ska[3] encyclopædia written from a Biblical point of view, in Australian English.[4] It is the brainchild of Philip J. Rayment, and represents the second major splinter from Conservapedia (after RationalWiki);[5] Conservapedia itself being a reaction to Wikipedia.

ASK is aimed at misrepresenting a number of fields of science, history, law, linguistics, and philosophy to conform to PJR's particular "literal" interpretation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, PJR and his aSK pals will favor a creationist source over anything they can characterize as in any way antagonistic to creationism, no matter how false or unsupported the creationist source's claims are. It's difficult to know whether PJR is simply a bald-faced liar or truly believes in the positions he advocates. Nonetheless, if you're interested in debating creationists on topics such as whether dinosaurs lived alongside human beings or whether "atheistic evolutionists" have an absolute basis for morality like those goody-goody Christians, aSK is for you. Curiously, many RationalWiki masochists editors have signed up on the site.

Contents

[edit] Hierarchy

The hierarchy at ASK is not well established yet, but if the user rights groups are anything to go by it is going to be almost as tightly managed as RationalWikiWiki.[6]

In theory (used colloquially) the ranks from top to bottom, based on the number of rights:

  • Bureaucrat
  • Administrator
  • Umpire[7]
  • Senior member
  • Member
  • Autoconfirmed users
  • Users

In practice, the hierarchy is:

  • Philip J. Rayment, closely followed by
  • Bradley
  • various B-list creationists
  • Everyone else (which is to say no one else, as there are pretty much no other editors)

In keeping with the Conservapedia tradition of making editing as hard as possible, one must obtain the rank of member before one can upload images. An editor can move the subpages of their userpage, which is novel. Senior members can delete pages with less than two revisions and can participate in certain votes and committees.

In a display of some reasonable foresight, the ability to delete and restore page histories belongs only to bureaucrats.

To avoid any unpleasant tinge of democracy and to avoid any unbiblical worldviews leaking in to the upper echelons, members are elected to a higher rank by a vote of their seniors rather than their peers, or by being "known to management" (colloq. nepotism.) This is a wonderful mechanism for aSoK to develop its very own cabal.

[edit] Blocking

  • A parodist was the first person to be blocked. Initially blocked for a day, the block was increased to infinite and then reduced to one year, presumably as policy decisions were made on the fly.
  • Block log at ASK

[edit] Copyright

Contributors to ASK automatically transfer the copyright to their contributions to the site.[8] Content is not released under a free license. This is a major difference with projects like Wikipedia (and many other wikis, including RationalWiki), where contributors retain the copyright to their own work, and content is released under a free license (e.g. GNU FDL and/or some Creative Commons licenses) that irrevocably allows copying and derivative works, including for commercial purposes.[9]

This policy has significant long-term consequences. The site owner is the only person who can legally make decisions about content usage. He could for example decide to commercialize the project, turn it into a subscription site, or even shut it down completely. The community would have no means to oppose such decisions. Compare this to Wikipedia, whose content will always remain freely usable due to the irrevocable nature of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, even if the main site should ever be shut down.

[edit] Paradox?

One of the first extensions added to the site was Semantic Mediawiki. Despite this, much discussion has revolved around semantics, particularly the meaning of "information", the meaning of "evidence" and even the meaning of "meaning".

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ They prefer the asinine "aSK", no one knows why.
  2. ↑ N.B. editing is currently limited to politely agreeing with anything published by CMI, which for handy reference is included in the back of the Literalist Bible handed out at the door (your bank account will be debited).
  3. ↑ We kid you not.
  4. ↑ PJR whips out his MacQuarie dictionary.
  5. ↑ No one counts Liberapedia, since it is lame.
  6. ↑ http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Special:ListGroupRights
  7. ↑ The only rights an Umpires has above a normal editor is block rights, so it would appear to be rank below Member. However, PJR has only given this right to a subset of the Senior Members, so it would appear to be a hierarchical position.
  8. ↑ http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/aSK:Copyrights
  9. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright


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