Conservapedia:Conservapedian mathematics/Email to Andy

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[edit] My attempt to contact Andy

The following email was sent to DeanS, while I was blocked, on July 8, 2008. I do not know whether it was ever forwarded to Andy. I apologize for the unpleasant tone of this—one says things in private email that one might not say publicly. But it appears not to have gotten through, so here it is.

[Start of email]

Dean:

Please send this to Andy. He has his mail disabled. Sorry to bother you with this, but that seems to be the way it's gotta be. I'm blocked.

Andy:

The question has come up in the "Can you contact me privately?" section of your talk page (from Jinxmchue) about the legitimacy of some rather technical edits that have been made recently. He admits to having had only "Calculus in my junior year of high school", and wants more expert advice.

Well, I can provide that advice. But I've been blocked by Ed Poor. So you're going to have to wait for a month.

In the space of 6 days, Ed Poor (with a little help from Karajou) has decimated the ranks of people trying to help out with math and science articles. (Actually, worse than decimated, if one takes the true meaning of the word. "Devastated" would be a better term.)

It appears to be quite rare for 6 experts of the caliber of

• Mathoreilly
• DanielB
• LemonPeel
• SamHB (myself)
• Fantasia
• Wandering

to be trying to help Conservapedia at the same time, but this was the lucky state of CP recently. CP had an opportunity to make great progress in this area. Admittedly, not everything was polished very well at the time of the disaster, but these were good people. I, for one, am proud of my suggestion of "advanced" templates for these articles. I thought we could actually make an educational resource that people could find their way around in, and derive great enrichment from. Not all people would get the same enrichment, of course, but with articles carefully written by experts and appropriately graded, we could do a good job.

But Ed has destroyed all that. And destroyed it amidst claims of "I have taught SAT math and I earned AP credit for calculus" and "I have a year of high school physics and a year of college physics". Those boasts are ludicrous relative to the people he was blocking! Those people were real experts! Ed needs to defer to them, and make constructive comments on their efforts, and on how well those efforts are succeeding relative to his understanding. People like these don't come by very often!

Now there are lots of things that I would object to about some of these people's contributions, and I understand that some of them have been blocked for other infractions. And some (including myself) may have been less deferential than we should have been. I don't have time to track down all the details, and I'm not going to defend all of them. But I can say that:

• Mathoreilly and LemonPeel really seem to know their stuff.
• I do too, of course :-)
• While I've had some problems with DanielB (you may recall my discussing them with you several days ago), he also seems to know his stuff reasonably well. And he did create the templates that I had suggested. He also admitted that they may not be perfect, and he solicited suggestions. I can make those suggestions. But not for a month.

If you care about the status of Conservapedia as an educational resource, you should do this:

• Get Ed to back down. I realize that you place great value on sysop loyalty, but he is being way too destructive.
• Restore the following pages that Ed has deleted: Natural logarithm and Radioactivity. I can tell you that those are topics that high school students can understand when presented correctly, as they were in my high school. We can fix them. But I need to see them. Just deleting them is simply destructive of Conservapedia's aims.

It would also be good to get an explanation from Karajou of his infinite block of Mathoreilly: "(Inserting false information: Mathoreilly needs to learn his math back in grade school, and UCLA needs to give him his money back until he does.)" This seems unduly abusive. I can't find the false information, though admittedly there is a lot to look through. I may have missed something. Perhaps he can help me out. Also, I wonder if he could provide the source of his claim that Mathoreilly needs to re-learn grade-school math, or what the UCLA reference was about. Neither of those statements is consistent with my information. And the loss of Mathoreilly is a singular disaster.

Sam.

[End of email]