[WikiEN-l] Conservapedia "Commandments"

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> From: "Steve Bennett" <stevagewp at gmail.com>
>   Not sure if I've seen any discussion of this, but this was  
> interesting:
>
> http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/wikipedia-foes-set-up-right-site/ 
> 2007/03/02/1172868789933.html
>
> Their "Conservapedia Commandments" are intetresting too:
> #  Everything you post must be true and verifiable.
> # Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the  
> public domain.
> # Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without
> gossip or foul language.
> # When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give
> appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and
> "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical
> basis. See CE.
> # As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.[1]
> # Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry.
>
> I find it bizarre that the CE/AD thing is so important that it rates a
> mention in the Commandments. And the "true and verifiable" is a cute
> reference to our "verifiable, not true" :)

I haven't bothered to check edit histories and so forth, but I'd  
surmise that some Conservapedian may have been swept up in the BC/AD  
BCE/CE wars that went through here like a forest fire a year or so  
ago. Any silly dispute tends to be important to you if you're  
involved in it. We all know the pattern. You made what you know darn  
well is a tendentious but, you think, supportable edit. Someone  
reverts it in a curt way. Soon you're involved in an edit war with  
someone unreasonable. Next thing you know you've been blocked for  
3RR, and a sysop has protected The Wrong Version, and it's censorship...

The site is a strange mix of material written by Andrew Schlafly,  
material that really was developed by high school kids, and, in the  
past week or so, Wikipedia-style collaborative editing projects that  
are more like nostalgia.wikipedia.org than Wikipedia As We Know It.  
The "commandments" were partly developed by the kids.

Well, actually (cough) I guess I helped develop one of them myself.  
How on earth do I explain that?

Well, there was a discussion at some point about what the  
"commandments" should spell out as the _penalty_ for using British  
spelling. I suggested that since there hadn't been any cases of  
virulent Anglophilia yet maybe it wasn't too important. I noted that  
authors normally expect someone else to do the copy-editing, and that  
when (say) a British author submits a manuscript to an American  
publishing house or vice versa, they aren't expected to conform to  
the house style, the publisher just changes it (as witness the title  
of the first Harry Potter book).

So I suggested that the appropriate thing to do was, if a British  
spelling was noticed, was simply to change it with an edit comment  
like "Conservapedia style is to use American spellings." No fuss, no  
warnings to the author. Reserve any chiding/yelling/blocking for  
editors who were obviously systematically changing American to  
British spellings in existing articles. People thought this was a  
good idea and someone, one of the kids I think, explicitly added it  
as "You will only be blocked for violating command 5 if you  
repeatedly change words from American spelling to another spelling."

By the way... I need to see if anyone has responded to my proposal at  
Village Pump (technical)... I think we may be a little insensitive to  
issues that can arise from the fact that _redirects do not explain  
the reason for the redirect_. Probably most users don't even notice  
them, but if you don't understand them they can seem like magic...  
and _if_ it's a case where you're _sensitive_ on the topic they can,  
I think, send an unintended message.

For example, if you type in "phonograph record" and suddenly, pow!,  
you see "gramophone record," you wouldn't have to be unimaginably  
sensitive to think Wikipedia was saying "Dummy! It's _gramophone,_  
not _phonograph._" It is not at all impossible to misinterpret  
redirection as "correcting my spelling." One could imagine someone  
who thinks Presidential dignity requires full names to type in  
William J. Clinton and blink at the informality of "changing" it to  
Bill.

Some redirects are corrections of e.g. spelling errors. Some  
represent semi-conscious decisions about which of several  
alternatives is preferred or common. (Why should "Lady Mendl" become  
"Elsie de Wolfe" when there are probably more references to her under  
the former designation? Because she was famous before she became Lady  
Mendl, and because most biographies use the name Elsie de Wolfe).  
Some are almost totally arbitrary choices because a choice had to be  
made (a lot of the U. S./British choices are that way).

IMHO there's nothing totally crazy about Conservapedia saying "_our_  
house style is American Usage," although making it one of the  
"Commandments" seems... amusing.