Conservapedia:Newcomer's Guide

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Newcomer's Guide
What is going on?
Illustrated guide
Commentary
Active users
Best of Conservapedia
Blatant Plagiarism
Delusions
Differences with Wikipedia
Hijacked Articles
Refutations
"SDG"
Sysops
Timeline
CP in the News
More about CP

This guide is intended to provide new RationalWiki users with basic information about Conservapedia, its modus operandi, and to clarify your relationship with regard to this seminal work of Western society. Be forewarned that this guide is written from the non-conservative perspective, so if creationism is your bag, baby, the following may not be a "friendly" guide, but will give you the general idea.

Contents

[edit] Introduction

Conservapedia is often billed as the Religious Right's Wikipedia. In reality it is nothing of the sort. It started out as a project for homeschooled children and became overrun by people who saw it as a place to further their own agendas, and people who opposed these agendas. A large proportion of those active at any given time are parodists, people pretending to agree with the site's ideology for their own and readers' amusement. The result is that today it is a disorganised political blog with a few dictionary entries. Any absurdities you might find there may or may not have been sincerely meant by their authors.

[edit] Dramatis personæ

  • Andrew Schlafly: The owner and the person with ultimate control over the site.
  • The administrators: These are the people chosen by Schlafly to manage the site. Most of them are unimportant and inactive, usually former and current students of Schlafly's homeschooling courses. Those that aren't, are over 40 Republican white males; these are the ones you will notice around the most. They are by and large people who are not wanted any where else and attribute this to discrimination based on their beliefs rather than their behaviour. They are basically bullies with chips on their shoulders who relish the power that they have been given. Keep in mind that even the upper ranks have included a few parodists. Most of the significant sysops have a separate article you can read about them:
  • CPWebmaster: Not a hugely significant person, but most people don't realise Andy doesn't do any of the tech work. When the site goes tits up it is this guy's fault. Most likely a former student of Andy's.
  • Old legends: Several former members of Conservapedia live on in folklore and are occasionally referenced on WIGO and WIGO talk.
  • MexMax: After being given block rights, blocked the entire site. People who imitate this are referred to as having gone MexMax.
  • Bugler: Long term parodist who caused a lot of problems.
  • CollegeRepublican: Received sysop rights after 1 minute, only ever made two three edits.
  • Minor players: Neither one nor the other, but show up regularly:

[edit] Conservapedia Concepts

  • Conservapedia Terms: Aschlafly regularly makes up new phrases to describe people or groups he doesn't like, which is frankly just about everybody. Not only are the terms completely unencyclopedic, as they originate in the mainspace of Conservapedia without having been referenced anywhere in the real world previously, they are also a great source of laughs. When Aschflaly unveils another term, most dedicated Conservapedians will fall over themselves to add new examples to the article, and a race ensues as to who will add it to WIGO first. A useful table has been compiled here to track some of the Conservapedia terms.
  • Deceit: Aschlafly is convinced that only liberals are capable of deceit: they are the only humans in the history of time that have ever lied. The definition is narrowed & widened at will to suit challenges to this, errr, "worldview." Many RationalWiki users will refer to "deceit" by hyperlinking to the Conservapedia article, just to have a good laugh. As such, deceit has become synonymous with overzealous persecution of liberals, and paranoid ramblings.
  • Goat: goats are not welcome on Conservapedia, but on RationalWiki, they're loved... too much. No, seriously, they're just a running joke. Everything always needs goats.
  • Homeschooling Homeschooling is by far and away the best possible means for educating children as demonstrated by the fact that some of the finest minds ever produced were homeschooled. Ignoring the fact that most humans haven't lived in societies where public schools existed, Aschlafly also manipulates the data to prove his point by using a broad enough definition of homeschooling that practically anyone could qualify. Only an orphan who never interacts with anyone outside of school could possibly qualify as not-homeschooled.
  • Night editing: Only administrators and people in the "edit" group may edit between roughly midnight to 7 am on the server clock. If you can not edit at all and have not been blocked it is because night editing is on.
  • Liberal: in Conservapedia lexicon, a "liberal" is anyone who is not a young-earth creationist. Even Reagan Republicans are liberals.

Why not visit our DysLexicon?

[edit] Notes on editing Conservapedia

Because of the threat of severe and serial "vandalism" at Conservapedia and the lack of "trusworthy" Conservapedia administrators, all Conservapedia pages are locked from editing at certain hours of the day so that "unorthodox" and other "unproductive" material can be removed. In addition, articles on sensitive topics such as evolution are protected from editing on an almost continual basis. Unregistered users are not permitted to edit any page.

Despite the threat of legal action (and possibly ten years imprisonment if convicted) against editors who are caught "vandalising" Conservapedia, it should be noted that establishing a user account via an open proxy is generally permitted on Conservapediait is often possible to edit via an open proxy for a short period of time. Karajou, Jallen and TK have been known to use Checkuser to ban users en masse and some efforts have been made to identify open proxies when certain users have been banned. See How to use proxies. This is in contrast to Wikipedia, where account creation from known open proxies is strictly forbidden by technical means.

The threat of blocking hangs heavily over editors at Conservapedia, and blocks are used (often without warning) not only for vandalism and violating the dreaded 90/10 rule, but often for inserting balanced material into articles, disagreeing with a sysop or pointing out how ridiculous their opinions are. Sysop comments often imply that they expect all editors, including new users, to know the pecking order, be aware of who has blocking powers and avoid entering a dispute with them.

[edit] Conservapedia Fun

The following are various examples of fun and snark directed at Conservapedia and Conservapedians

[edit] See Also

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