Cant create an account there anymore, and their servers are slow as heck.
On 2/23/07, wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com <wikipedia2006(a)dpbsmith.com> wrote:
From: Cheney Shill
<halliburton_shill(a)yahoo.com>
David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia
David, you do realize that this site is not comedic or
parody? It's best described as a front site for christian
fundamentalists, registered by the people behind
http://www.eagleforum.org, the "leading the pro-family
movement since 1972". [it's registered to]
Schlafly, Andrew aschlafly(a)aol.com
(who is Phyllis Schlafly's son, and general counsel for the Association of
American Physicians and Surgeons, a more-or-less venerable and legitimate
right-wing organization of AMA members for whom the AMA isn't right-wing
enough).
Actually, if you analyze the articles and make plausible assumptions,
there are only a _few_ conservative Christian adults working on it, perhaps
a dozen kids, and a couple of people who are either parents or young adults
who are conscientiously trying to rough out some kind of outline for an
encyclopedia by entering substubs for every term contained in their
textbooks.
And at least two oddball Wikipedia admins (editing under the same user
names they use on Wikipedia), who are emphatically not conservative
Christian creationists but who, for some reason have enjoyed trying to
improve the articles (in good faith; in some cases, yes, trying to moderate
over-the-top conservative nuttiness when it strays so far from the facts
that Conservapedians are willing to accept the changes... but mostly just
doing straight Wikipedian work).
It's probably moot, anyway. I think it's melting down.
After a few notices in conservative blogs, praising the site (apparently
the bloggers hadn't actually looked at it), Google searches show the top
hits now to be on non-conservative sites cackling away with mocking glee at
the idiocy of it all.
The interesting part is that the site _is_, increasingly, becoming a
source of comedic parody, as vandals flood in, and the most popular kind of
vandalism consists of inserting over-the-top caricatures of creationist POV.
The site's rants on AD/BC versus CE/BCE, and its insistence on American
spelling are genuine enough, and the site brought it on itself by promoting
an Wiki with three thousand amateurish substubs, a few dozen
high-school-term-paper quality articles, and a few dozen personal essays by
Schlafly as if were a reliable encyclopedia.
It's interesting to watch. When you can get in and look at Recent Changes,
it's clear that the admins are currently unable to block vandal accounts or
delete joke articles as fast as they're created, and unless it's a
seven-day's wonder and traffic eases off they're going to need to solicit
donations for new servers. (It's no worse than Wikipedia was at various
times in 2004, though!)
It also makes you realize how important it is for a Wiki-based
encyclopedia to have policies and procedures that are roughly in harmony
with those of those people who are spontaneously attracted to the site.
Wikipedia's neutrality policy, as stated and as applied in practice, may
have an even greater depth of wisdom to it than I had previously
appreciated.
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