Conservapedia

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Description

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An encyclopedia written with a conservative viewpoint; specifically, Conservapedia's articles are politically conservative, friendly to young Earth creationism and conservative Christianity, and USA-centric. Conservapedia is in general hostile to liberals, homosexuals, and people who support or teach 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, pro-Evolution, 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.

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.

There is an enormous project at RationalWiki to discredit, mock, and ridicule Conservapedia. They gleefully point out, on the popular "WIGO" page, instances of narrow-minded, foolish, or bigoted behavior by Conservapedia sysops. See Conservapedia RationalWiki war

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.