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Conservapedia: Difference between revisions
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"Difficulties" -- new section
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*Extremely poor scholarship. Many 'articles' are [http://www.conservapedia.com/Coral_snake one or two short paragraphs ]at most, except those relating to how awful [http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal liberals], [http://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality homosexuals], [http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism atheists], or [http://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution evolutionists] are, which can run for many hundreds of lines. | *Extremely poor scholarship. Many 'articles' are [http://www.conservapedia.com/Coral_snake one or two short paragraphs ]at most, except those relating to how awful [http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal liberals], [http://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality homosexuals], [http://www.conservapedia.com/Atheism atheists], or [http://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution 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 [http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_friendship how Liberals are incapable of real friendship]. | *Some confusion between "Encyclopedia" and "Blog", as the sysops make many long, hilariously opinionated articles on various Conservative talking-points, such as [http://www.conservapedia.com/Liberal_friendship 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 aug 2008, shows the following: | |||
*Nontrivial article/essay edits: 140 (28%) | |||
*Trivial article/essay edits: 120 (24%) | |||
::(<= 20 characters, 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== | ==Evaluation== | ||