Conservapedia

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Description

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An encyclopedia with a politically conservative viewpoint, friendly to creationism and Christianity, and massively hostile to Liberals, homosexuals, and people who believe in the theory of evolution. The site was started in November 2006 by Andrew Schlafly and a group of homeschooled children to provide an alternative to the perceived anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-conservative bias of Wikipedia. The main purpose of the site is to provide a family-friendly resource for homeschooled children from fundamentalist Christian homes. However, some more adult topics such as homosexuality are also treated in depth, to explain all the myriad ways in which they are considered abhorrent.

As of 31 July 2008, Conservapedia has 22,091 registered users, of which 30 (or 0.14%) have Administrators rights. Of these registered users 11,086 were blocked (8691 for an infinite period). Roughly half the users are currently blocked and over a third are permanently blocked. It is unclear what proportion of unblocked registered users regularly use the site.

Criticisms

Many criticisms of the site can be found at RationalWiki [1].

These include:

• The sysops and admins arbitarily deciding whether or not to enforce the Conservapedia Commandments (see this and Commandment number 5, together with the fact 'Learn Together' is a sysop for one example).
• Removing cited facts and calling it 'liberal bias' simply because these facts do not conform to the preconceived notions of the leaders of the site.[2].
• The management driving away experts from the site by, for example, demanding that they email a sysop proof of their qualifications before they continue to post on the site, after that sysop reverted edits on mathematics because they didn't understand them.[3]
• The selective enforcement of Conservapedia's "90/10 Rule", which, despite being "a guideline", is a popular way for the sysops to squelch debate on talk pages via blocking and threats of same. Users are not always warned in advance that 90% of their edits must be in articles. Users who did not know that they were breaking any rule can be arbitrarily blocked.
• Some pages, such as "Theory of Evolution" and "Homosexuality" being permanently locked and monopolized by one obsessed sysop.
• Amusingly, despite the fact that many Conservapedia sysops read it regularly, and even refer to it obliquely on talk pages and in comments, mentioning RationalWiki by name is taboo on Conservapedia. Doing so directly gets mere mortal posters banned.
• Near-total lack of oversight or any sort of appeals process for users who think a sysop is abusing their authority. Many sysops don't even have email enabled, making it impossible for someone they ban to even find out why.
• Extremely poor scholarship. Many 'articles' are one or two short paragraphs at most, except those relating to how awful liberals, homosexuals, atheists, or evolutionists are, which can run for many hundreds of lines.
• Some confusion between "Encyclopedia" and "Blog", as the sysops make many long, hilariously opinionated articles on various Conservative talking-points, such as how Liberals are incapable of real friendship.

Difficulties

Because of its extreme views on evolution, politics, society, history, education, religion, sexuality, and science in general, and its very narrow orthodoxy on these subjects, Conservapedia is the subject of massive ridicule throughout the internet. This, coupled with its open wiki organization, creates serious difficulties for their administrators. There is an enormous traffic in editors arguing with sysops and changing articles to be less extreme. This leads to massive censorship, reversion (even comments on talk pages are often censored and reverted) and account blocking.

New accounts are created as frequently as they are permanently blocked. One can't know for sure, but it is plausible to assume that many new account creations are simply responses to blocking. Such an account is generally considered a "sockpuppet", and is a minor irritation on sites such as Wikipedia. On Conservapedia they are a major problem for the administrators. They are strictly forbidden, of course, but, because of the wide availability of internet proxies, they can't be stopped. The Conservapedia administrators frequently block IP addresses, sometimes in huge (> 100,000) blocks, in a futile attempt to stop edits that are hostile to their philosophy.

Another aspect of this difficulty that editing permission, except for "trusted" users, is turned off at night, so that it is only allowed when the site is being continuously monitored by an administrator ready to take immediate action.

Conservapedia also has a very high traffic in arguments and conflict on talk pages, relative to edits to article pages. A typical listing of 500 "recent changes", taken at 18:31 EDT, 16 July 2008, and covering about two days, shows the following:

• Nontrivial article/essay edits: 140 (28%)
• Trivial article/essay edits: 120 (24%)

(<= 20 characters, or fussing with templates, redirects, wikilinks, "terms" items, protection changes)

• Edit warring (reversion) on article/essay pages: 22 (4%)
• Edits to essay/article talk pages: 59 (12%)
• Edits to user pages: 15 (3%)
• Edits to user talk pages: 84 (17%)
• User creation events: 34 (7%)
• User blocks, less than 5 years: 2 (0%)
• User blocks, 5 years or more: 24 (5%)

Evaluation

The great strength of the Wiki format is allowing anyone to edit. This causes major problems for the management of Conservapedia, who are forced to spend much of their time scrutinizing every edit for deviation from their ideology. The site is sometimes characterized as "Andy's blog" because of his pervasive control over its content. A major consequence of making it a wiki instead of the usual (closed) blog is that it has the problems noted above.