Conservapedia

If you haven't had the pleasure of surfing over to Conservapedia, you really owe it to yourself to see the kind of idiocy that floats around down south. Conservapedia is the self-declared "Much-needed conservative alternative to Wikipedia" which is "increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American".

The founders of this little project seem to have a really big problem with the use of C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E (Before Common Era) in dates. So much is this an issue for them, that the use of B.C. and A.D. is proscribed on both the front page in what is effectively the mission statement of the project, as well as in the The Conservapedia Commandments. As you can imagine, the quality of the articles on Conservapedia is rather deplorable, in nearly every case demonstrating the complete lack of a neutral point of view (You can imagine which direction the bias is skewed), and lacking any kind of factual accuracy whatsoever.

My favorite page is the Examples of Bias in Wikipedia page, which has a running list of, at time of writing, 27 problems the authors see in Wikipedia.

Lets take a sample look.

1. Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.

I don't think the use of terms which don't engender a Christian bias in the dating scheme is really a conspiracy against Christians guys. Why does this irritate you so much?

2. The entry for the Renaissance in Wikipedia refuses to give enough credit to Christianity.

I really don't understand why you don't bother to call this Christipedia. This comment really doesn't explain what you're talking about, cites no references, etc.

4. There is a strong anti-American and anti-capitalism bias on Wikipedia

This point goes on to cite a single instance where a single entry does not refer to some deal the States made with the Philippines. It's unclear on how this demonstrates the anti-American bias in Wikipedia. I further don't understand why the author didn't simply add that in. That's the whole point of how a wiki works.

5. Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American

I really do enjoy this point quite a bit. I'm not sure why the spelling of words could anger someone so much, or how spelling demonstrates bias. I also don't understand how most English speaking users can be American, and at the same time have Wikipedia supposedly littered with articles which are anti-American (unless you guys hate yourselves?).



I could go on, it's worth taking a peek around, if for nothing else than the comedic value of a project which fails to understand the fundamental underpinnings of the format upon which it is based (in that it complains about single instances of content in another project of the same format, when the format is specifically designed to allow you to change that content), and exposes a profoundly deep and troubling psychosis within a number of our neighbours to the south. I'm heartened by the fact that I know that most of the US doesn't bear the opinions of the people who produce tripe like Conservapedia, but it's scary nonetheless. Of course, there's always the possibility that it's a parody site, given the level of stupidity it contains. I really hope that's the case (in which case it's no less amusing).

If you want to read some additional pokes, you might want to read comments by
Orac, Ed, PZ, Afarensis, Tim, Dr. X, and John