[WikiEN-l] Latest comedic parody of Wikipedia

[wikipedia2006 at dpbsmith.com]

> From: Cheney Shill <halliburton_shill at yahoo.com>
> David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> > http://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
> >
> 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 at 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.