Conservapedia: Difference between revisions

'''Conservapedia''' is a right-wing {{tag|encyclopedia}} written with a {{tag|conservative}} viewpoint. More specifically, Conservapedia's articles are politically conservative, friendly to young Earth creationism and conservative {{tag|Christianity}}, and {{tag|United States of America|USA}}-centric. Conservapedia is in general {{tag|Wikis with a strong viewpoint|hostile}} to liberals, homosexuals, and people who support or teach the theory of evolution or special or general relativity. Conservapedia also removes ideologically neutral content that provides information that could be used in ways deemed contrary to Christian ethics.[http://conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&page=Suicide+methods]

The site was started in November {{tag|Founded in 2006|2006}} by [[wp:Andrew Schlafly|Andrew Schlafly]] (presently the site's only active [[bureaucrat]]) and a group of home-schooled people to provide an alternative to the perceived anti-Christian, pro-Evolution, anti-American and anti-conservative bias of [[English Wikipedia|Wikipedia]]. The stated purpose of the site is to provide a family-friendly resource for home-schooled children from fundamentalist Christian homes. However, a few more {{tag|Adult content|adult topics}} such as [[cp:Homosexuality|homosexuality]] are also treated in depth from their viewpoint.

Conservapedia cannot be edited during certain hours of the night, U.S. time, except by users with special "night editing" rights, to prevent [[vandal]]s from striking when most if not all of the [[Sysop|administrators]] are asleep. This is rather inconvenient since an editor may begin editing an article but not be able to save his edit if the deadline passes while he is working on his revision. He cannot even store it on-wiki for saving later, since Conservapedia doesn't have [[mw:Extension:Checkpoint]] installed; the only option is to hit the browser's Back button and copy and paste the the revision text into some other pastebin, for saving to Conservapedia later. The site does not even state why the edit is disallowed or when or if the restriction will end, but merely says "The action you have requested is limited to users in one of the groups: Administrators, edit", leaving the user to possibly think that his editing rights have been revoked or that editing Conservapedia is [[:Category:ByInvitation|by invitation only]].

Conservapedia also has no email notification user preferences options available; this significantly limits potential for maintaining user engagement.[https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45022] It is no wonder, then, that the site has fewer than 200 users (fewer than 80 of whom have the coveted "edit" right)[http://conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&limit=80&group=edit] who have edited the site in the last 91 days.

Conservapedia is frequently offline (sometimes for days at a time) and favors a very liberal deletion policy. At the start of November 2010, account creation was turned off and prospective users must now email the site owner to have an account created. This followed several months during which account creation was disabled most of the time and most new users were being blocked on sight. Account creation is still occasionally enabled, although most accounts created in this manner are immediately blocked.

In December 2010, Conservapedia started to block certain ranges of [[IP editors|IP addresses]] from even viewing the site. Many IP ranges in the [[:Category:United Kingdom|UK]], [[:Category:France|France]], [[:Category:Germany|Germany]] and other [[:Category:Europe|European]] countries now receive a 403 error when trying to load any page.

==Suggested guidelines for prospective editors==

[[Category:Political wikis]]