Conservapedia

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Conservapedia

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Conservapedia is the latest public manifestation of how the American fundamentalist Christian right "thinks". It is a wiki-based attempt to build a heavily biased and factually incorrect encyclopedia. Due to its bias, it ends up portraying liberals, atheists, and homosexuals (along with whoever the "bête noire du jour" is, like Muslims) as being evil^[2] and anti-American.^[3] Their attacks on these groups are fueled by traditionalism and jingoistic pro-Americanism. It has been called "The Watchtower of the Internet."^[4]

The site was founded by Andrew Schlafly,^[5] spawn of professional anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly,^[6] in an attempt to offset what he perceived as an excessive liberal bias at Wikipedia.^[5] Conservapedia's goal is to try to create a version of Wikipedia that has a conservative bias, especially when it comes to issues where politics and fundamentalist Christianity overlap, such as creationism, evolution, sexuality and morality^[7].

Conservapedia has billed itself as "the most open-minded wiki on the internet."^{[citation needed]} It is, in fact, in the running for the most closed-minded site of any sort of the internet. Evidence supporting their new claim has not been forthcoming, mostly because there isn't any.

No prominent conservative politician, writer or media personality has ever aligned themself with, or recommended, Conservapedia. To do so would be to commit an act of career-suicide.

[edit] Management

Andrew Schlafly at the helm.

Currently, Conservapedia ("CP" for short) is managed by Aschlafly^[8] and a group of homeschooled teenagers known as "The Panel",^[9] who seem to have given up on Conservapedia because not a single panel request has been considered yet.^[10] 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.^[11]

Liberal revulsion for Conservapedia is mollified by the knowledge that a Wikipedia-like site can only thrive with a relatively free exchange of ideas and some tolerance for vandals, hoaxers, and crackpots, and the gang of beady-eyed zealots running CP are going to stifle it to death while thinking they're 'protecting' it. (For an example, look at all the pages that various editors have locked so that nobody can 'deface' them, thus preventing anyone from improving them as well.)

In addition, Conservapedia has taken the extreme step of preventing any user from registering a new account or making any edits at certain times of the day unless granted special rights, which are rarely granted. ^[12]

The management at Conservapedia also struggles with the wiki software. Some sysops do not even know how to unblock users.^[13]

[edit] Philosophical stance

Conservapedia (The Trusworthy [sic] Encyclopedia) is an (abnormal) encyclopedia with an American Conservative Christian point of view. But what exactly do these terms mean? Some of Conservapedia's main tenets include:

Licensed medical professionals, on the dangers of Conservapedia.

• Biblical literalism, often putting Old Testament writings ahead of the actual teachings of Jesus.‎
  • A young-earth creationist viewpoint
  • Anti-homosexual^[14]
  • Anti-abortion^[15]
  • Anti-sex-education in schools^[16]
  • Pro-capital punishment
• Global warming denialism^[17]
  • Anti-environmental controls
• Anti-Islam (except for its viewpoints that happen to agree with theirs, such as those on homosexuality and adultery)
  • Pro-Israel
• Anti-"liberal"^[18] (a pejorative term for any viewpoint that contradicts CP's views)
  • Anti-government
  • Anti-public school
  • Anti-intellectual^[19]
  • Anti-public health system
  • Anti-gun control^[20]
  • Anti-Medicare
  • Anti-vaccination^[21]
  • Pro-baby shaking^[22]
  • Anti-minimum wage
  • Anti-left wing economics in general, and anything that will help the working classes dig themselves out of poverty
  • Pro-neoliberalism and laissez faire
  • Pro-homeschooling (religious)^[23]
• Anti-United Nations^[24]
  • Anti-European
  • Anti-Canadian
• Anti-Democratic Party
  • Anti-Independent Party
  • Anti-Green Party
  • Anti-Socialist Party
• Anti-relativity - both in the moral sense and in terms of physics
• (Basically anti-everyone but them.)

See also: Conservapedia:Delusions

[edit] Public restroom stance

W  I  D  E  

Parodist T.Paper's contribution to the article on paper.

[edit] Usefulness of Conservapedia

A recognised scholar's analysis of Conservapedia

Conservapedia is actually useful when arguing with various strains of religious fundamentalist, in ascertaining just what on earth they claim to think themselves. Of course religous fundamentalists don't think themselves. They let their religious leaders think for them. Note that Wikipedia is also surprisingly detailed in delineating the various strains of creationist thought, should you wish to survey the rabbit hole before diving in head first.

As an encyclopedia, Conservapedia is not so useful. Whereas Wikipedia has a very broad coverage of virtually all subjects, due to having a large community of editors with diverse interests, Conservapedia operates with a small and dysfunctional community of editors, fixated with certain subjects and attitudes.

Most of the more active sysops are more interested in pursuing their various vendettas against atheism, homosexuality, the theory of evolution, the Democrats, public schools, and perceived liberal biases in the media, than in creating a diverse learning resource. There is an apparently high turnover of new editors, many of whom are either banned or soon give up on the wiki (although many of these may well be the same people signing up under an endless stream of pseudonyms), and there is a small number of devoted editors who tirelessly create detailed articles on their own individual interests.

This results in a disproportionate coverage of specialist subjects such as Japanese culture (thanks to JessicaT)^[25] and Middle-earth (thanks to Tolkiendil),^[26] a morbidly repetitive treatment of subjects such as atheism^[27] and homosexuality^[28] (largely the work of sysop Conservative), and many anti-liberal diatribes by Aschlafly himself.^[29] Meanwhile coverage of more common and academic subjects is confined to either useless stub articles, or plagiarised text pasted from other source, along with a few articles or projects which have been started but obviously left unfinished and probably unnoticed.^[30]

[edit] Accuracy of Conservapedia

Parody or conservapedian wisdom? You decide.

“First get your facts; then you can distort them at your leisure”

~ Mark Twain

Conservapedia, like any encyclopedia (especially those using the open-editing wiki format), is prone to errors. There is reason to believe that Conservapedia is actually far inferior to Wikipedia and that its articles are not to be trusted. Conservapedia's math and history articles have been criticized for a plethora of errors,^[31] while a numerical comparison of Conservapedia articles with articles in Wikipedia have shown Conservapedia's articles to be lagging in quality.^[32]

Conservapedia could actually surpass the folks at Wikipedia in terms of accuracy, coverage and comprehensiveness - after all, founder Andrew Schlafy did intend it to be a home-schooling tool - something which universities and schools do not view Wikipedia as being worthy of. However, it appears (from the wonderfully compact size of blurbs we purloin from Conservapedia for extension on Rational Wiki) that is not possible, given Conservapedia's stringent quality standards and policy of excluding miscreants who abuse their trust by vandalising the site.

[edit] Interesting gaps in Conservapedia

Like the press of the now-defunct USSR, what Conservapedia doesn't say can be just as enlightening as what it does say. For example, for a long time various human bodily parts were banned from having entries on CP, leading to CP having thousands of words about why a woman shouldn't have an abortion, and not one word on the organs involved in getting her pregnant in the first place.^[33] This would seem to be related to the fact that their primary audience is home-schooled children, whom they feel should be shielded from such knowledge.

Furthermore, they do not mention the liberal views held by many conservative politicians on certain issues. For example, Conservapedia's entry on Barry Goldwater, one of the most prominent champions of American Conservatism, does not mention that the long-time U.S. Senator (in many ways more a libertarian than conservative) was firmly pro-choice, nor that he was against the exclusion of gays from the military. Their article furthermore neither mentions that the Republican was good friends with Democratic U.S. Senator, and later President, John F. Kennedy, nor that at the end of his life, Barry Goldwater was becoming increasingly worried about the influence the Religious Right was gaining in the Republican Party. Although one might argue that these omissions might be because Conservapedia is pro-life, anti-gays in the military (and anti-gay in general), intent on defaming Kennedy (and any other "liberal"), and does not wish to be reminded of that one of their most beloved statesmen was in fierce disagreement with them on these issues, this explanation seems to go against their claimed goal of being unbiased, and even "trustworthy".

[edit] Conservapedia and fear of the unknown

As is common with very conservative groups throughout history, much of their fear stems from unfamiliarity with diverse, nuanced situations and a tendency to believe others are conspiring against them. The former creates fear in the ultra-conservative mind that their position in society is not secure; the latter defines their obsession with security issues.

In the case of Conservapedia, these fears are realized in deletion of user pages and the site as a whole spending an inordinate amount of time tracking down vandalism and protecting pages.

Though certainly not all will agree, this “fear of the unknown” is often used to explain so-called “blind faith.”

[edit] Conservapedia's "news" blog

One of Conservapedia's more ludicrous features is the blog that is attached to its main page, titled "in the news". Outrageous, idiotic and brain-pain inducing, it nonetheless pales in comparison to the main page talk page, which is largely devoted to conversation about those "news" "articles".

Also of note is that the critics of Conservapedia frequently call Conservapedia itself a blog rather than an encyclopedia, because many of the articles tend to cover pet peeves of the editors, and Andy himself posts tons of material that belongs in a blog rather than an encyclopedia.

[edit] Conservapedia v. Wikipedia: A self-proclaimed jihad!

Conservapedia claims 16 differences with Wikipedia^[34] that they assert make it far superior to what is often considered the best general resource on the web.^[35] The differences range from:

• Proveably false: Conservapedia claims Wikipedia is commercial because it is creating a for-profit search engine;^[34] it is not.^[36]

• Unfounded: Conservapedia claims that Wikipedia allows gossip;^[34] this is hard to prove or disprove.

• Frivolous: Conservapedia claims that they keep the number of templates in their articles down.^[34]

[edit] Teaching value

Conservapedia continually claims that Wikipedia is noneducational.

While Wikipedia may not be the most authoritative reference site on the web it certainly does not deserve an "F". Studies have shown that Wikipedia is comparable or nearly as good as Encyclopædia Britannica^[38] which is universally accepted as a good educational resource. Additionally, Andy's very premise is flawed. The real test of an encyclopedia is not "how clearly and concisely it explains something to an inquiring student or adult." Rather it is how broad, accurate, and complete its coverage is. "Concise" is one of Andy's favorite words, by which he means "brief". By that measurement, CP is an excellent site. Unless you're explaining the evils of homosexuality, evolution, or atheism, the general rule on CP seems to be that a few sentences will do. They hold to that pretty well. Britannica, for example, is far from concise, and often not particularly clear. Andy, one must suppose, would assert that CP is a superior encyclopedia, a laughable assertion on anyone's terms. In terms of coverage that is broad, accurate, or complete, CP gets at best a D-. Whatever one chooses to give Wikipedia, it's certainly much better than that.

[edit] Pornography

Another common claim at Conservapedia is that Wikipedia is trafficking pornography to minors. Schlafly has stated one at least on occasion "Wikipedia is feeding pornography to children".^[39] Although Wikipedia does have many articles on sexuality, and even child sexuality, calling those articles pornography is specious. What is considered pornographic imagery is a subjective judgement, and Conservapedia itself is not free from nude pictures.^[40]

[edit] "Justice" at Conservapedia

"Don't do as I do, do as I say."

The rule of law at Conservapedia is enforced by the sysops. There is a code of rules known as the Conservapedia Commandments but they are seldom followed. Blocking is rampant, partly because wandalism is also rampant, but also because discipline is handled so firmly and arbitrarily. In fact, Andrew Schlafly himself has sometimes commented that he finds it satisfying to block users. When he awarded blocking rights to RodWeathers (who later revealed himself to be a parodist), he told him that "This is one of the best aspects of Conservapedia, and you will find value in it". On another occasion he told Jpatt, "I find blocking to be good exercise".^[41]

One of the most commonly abused rules is an unofficial one not actually on the rule book,^[42] called the 90/10 rule, which states that editors must not make around 90% of their edits in the talk pages and only 10% in articles. This is enforced arbitrarily by sysops when they come across an editor who brings up a point they disagree with (no matter how well sourced or logical), or who just won't mind their own business about other people's blocks.

Commandment 1 says to not copy "from Wikipedia or elsewhere"^[43], but most users and many of the more active sysops copy and paste regularly ^[44][45], but when an editor copies and pastes an article that they disagree with, they will delete it for plagiarism. The Conservapedia article Arguments for the existence of God was copied and pasted and the user who created it admitted it in the edit summary saying "(copied from theopedia.com / public domain)".^[46] When an article was copied off RationalWiki (Which is under the same licensing as Theopedia) they deleted it because it was "copied from RationalWiki".

Hypocritically Schlafly and his protégé TK pretend that they accept liberal contributions in support of intellectual freedom. What does that mean? They won’t always ban you for writing anything liberal so long as you don’t put it back after they’ve taken it out.

[edit] Censorship on Conservapedia

Conservapedia promotes Free Speech!

Also deleted was a page called "Examples of Bias in Conservapedia." Although "Examples of Bias on Wikipedia" is alive and kicking, apparently THERE IS NO BIAS. Interestingly, one of the "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia" is that virtually the exact same action was performed on Wikipedia.

Conservapedia is often guilty of one of their most common claims against Wikipedia, censorship. Conservapedia, for example, deleted a section of an article on persecution of Christians that pointed out Christians sometimes persecuted other religious sects, and in the article on the Intifada deleted an addition pointing out mildly that innocent Palestinians have also been killed.

Conservapedia has frequently been criticized for its long list of protected pages, including Homosexuality^[47], Theory of evolution^[48], George W Bush^[49], and even Goat^[50]!

Another frequent complaint is that Conservapedia sysops simply ban any members they don't agree with, censoring in a roundabout way by removing any opposing viewpoints. Andrew Schlafly is protected from criticism of his claims and "insights" by sysops who remove the critiques and block the editors responsible.

[edit] RationalWiki censorship

Currently any references to RationalWiki in articles or talk pages are blocked by Conservapedia's spam filter. Any editor who tries a workaround (such as inserting an html "comment" in the word) will be insta-banned.

[edit] Banning users

Conservapedia's sysops generally seem to be inclined to ban editors as quickly as possible, for even the most frivolous of reasons. At first, we thought that this was simply due to their massive tendencies towards paranoia and authoritarian abuse of power, but we now realize this serves a practical purpose as well. To maintain ideological purity and keep out their many imagined enemies, CP's sysops have to vet every individual edit. The more users they have, the less possible this becomes.

It is also possible that the threat of a capricious infinite ban which permanently hangs over all normal users, combined with the 90/10 rule which discourages lengthy talk page discussions, has the effect of silencing any real debate and opposition to the ideology of the site.

The odds are high that in this all-encompassing net, a few editors who actually liked the site have found themselves kicked off it.

[edit] Suspicions of parody

One theory which continually re-emerges is that Conservapedia is not run by the Religious Right at all; that instead it is an extreme parody of fringe loonbags, such as the Westboro Baptist Church, since it is hard to imagine such a large group of people being so wingnutty. Either way, though, it is undoubtedly true that if Conservapedia is written without irony, we should pity its authors rather than be angered by them.

It has also been speculated that Andy Schlafly is actually a closet liberal, but uses Conservapedia to hide this fact (primarily from his mother).

[edit] Impact of Conservapedia

[edit] Reinforcement of viewpoint

Some homeschooled children in the 13 to 16 age range are quite likely to believe most or all of the stuff they read there, due to their only being exposed to right-wing Christian fundamentalism. In such sad cases, what Conservapedia presents builds on what they have already been taught. Likewise, adults who have spent all their lives, or at least, many recent years, immersed in right-wing Christian fundamentalism are also likely to believe a great deal of what they read in Conservapedia.

Estimated percentage of readers in this category: 0.02%

[edit] Embarrassing the viewpoint

Genuinely sane conservatives are quite likely to be appalled at what they encounter while reading Conservapedia's "version" of conservatism. Also, Conservapedia can reinforce the "ugly American" image abroad.

Estimated percentage of readers in this category: 0.03%

[edit] Entertainment

In this view, Conservapedia actually has no impact - people simply visit the site for a good mid-morning laugh, post-luncheon facepalm, and perhaps a before bed test of their irony meter's protection circuits.

Estimated percentage of readers in this category: 99.95%

[edit] Site statistics

Recent events in Conservapedia history and their effects on its rank.

Alexa.com, a website traffic ranking site, tracks visits by users of its Alexa Toolbar software, and offers one way to monitor the popularity of Conservapedia. In September 2007, the site received barely 5% the number of visits it received in March of 2007, when the blog frenzy brought it into the public eye.^[51]

As of mid-June 2009 Conservapedia's traffic is tapering off. Alexa currently estimates it being visited by only 0.0021% of the global Alexa userbase over a three month average - this is down 7% since the last period. Ranked as the 54,418th most visited site on the internet over a three month average, this figure is 8,418 places lower than its position three months ago. People are reading less than they use to, with visitors now viewing 2.98 pages on the site on average - this is down 17%, and a long way down from the high of nearly 6. They are spend 3.2 minutes a day on the website, down 19% from the last three month period. 8.05% of the visitors came to Conservapedia having just viewed RationalWiki.

Conservapedia's page ranking has slid and stagnated in the last three months (see right). In mid-June, the website fell out of Alexa's top 100,000 website for the third time in 2009 (the two previous occasions being during the server crash in January and the RationalWiki boycott in February). Conservapedia had been in the top 100,000 since October 2007 until 2009. The only spike in traffic was due to a cracked.com article on bastardisations of the Wikipedia format. 10.39% of the traffic in the three month period came from cracked.com and this pushed Conservapedia into the 20,000 website for a few days.

Over 50.4% of their total traffic is estimated to come from the United States. For some reason Finland is second overall for the location of the visitor's IP address, where the site is just outside the top 3,000 most visited websites. A possible explanation is that Finland contains no people and is entirely populated by ducks.^[52]

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. Quantcast gives us some insight into who, in the US at least, is reading Conservapedia. As of mid-June 2009 it estimates that 95,158 US citizens visit Conservapedia monthly. It gives this description of its "average" visitor,

To give you an idea of what these people are thinking, googling Conservapedia yields more than half a million hits, though many are quite dubious. Ignoring the first two hits (which are for the site itself) nearly all the top results on google criticize or mock Conservapedia, with the exception, ironically, on listing #3, Wikipedia, which gives it about as fair an entry as one could hope for.

[edit] What others have said about Conservapedia

• "It is a detriment to conservative thought and movement." - TK, Conservapedia sysop^[53] (one can only assume that the type of movement being referred to is a bowel movement)

• "I've had bigger chunks'a corn in me crap." - Fat Bastard

• I was banned and the reason given was, "I had some problems getting the page to load." - user "GoogleRonPaul"

• "You'll have more a accurate history of the world in the pages of MAD Magazine, and twice as truthful too" - Scatterbrain66

• "[A]s accurate as a catatonic drunkard’s line of urine" - Evan Maloney, Australian journalist^[54]

• "What a cheap, shameful, tawdry example of prejudice-dressed-up-as-truth this Conservapedia is."- Evan Maloney^[55]

[edit] See also

• Andrew Schlafly
• Andrew Schlafly (satire)
• Conservapedia:An illustrated guide
• Chewbacca Defense
• Conservapedia Gala
• Conservapedia:An open letter from a disillusioned conservapedian
• Conservapedia:Best of Conservapedia
• Conservapedia:Conservapedia in 2012
• Conservapedia:Conservative Principles
• Conservatipedia
• CreationWiki
• Idiocracy
• Informative articles on Conservapedia
• Liberapedia — Another wiki made in response to Conservapedia.
• Kinder, Küche, Kirche
• Reading comprehension
• Rosenblum's First Law of Chocolate
• Stalinist Republic of Conservapedia

[edit] External links

• Conservapedia itself!
• A blog about life near Conservapedia
• We couldn't make this up - a new blog about life at Conservapedia.

[edit] Historic blog posts about Conservapedia

• Jon Swift: Conservapedia
• Michael Calore, Wired: What Would Jesus Wiki?
• Mark Frauenfelder, boingboing: Top ten most viewed pages on Wikipedia and Conservapedia
• Lester Haines, The Register: Need hard facts? Try Conservapedia

[edit] Footnotes