Conservapedia@Everything2.com

"A conservative encyclopedia you can trust."

E2 has some new competition in the collaborative database department! Conservapedia is here offering the denizens of the internet a new source of information, one that's not contaminated with neutrality or objectivity! It has over 3,800 articles! And all of those articles offer a conservative, pro-American, pro-Jesus take on their subject matter.

"Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. . . . You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of 'political correctness'."

Stephen Colbert famously said that "reality has a well-known liberal bias", and the American political right does not shy away from freeing itself of that bias, with news sources like Fox News and political gambits like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The GOP has shown no reticence to avoid reality when it poses a problem for their goals — so founding a conservative encyclopedia as a reaction to Wikipedia was really the next logical step. Perhaps the folks at Conservapedia really didn't notice the hilarious contradiction between the two sentences quoted above (and they're from the same paragraph; the elided portion was only one sentence long.) It appears that the irony in declaring your work to favor "Christianity and America" in one breath and then proclaiming it free of "political correctness" in the next is lost on the creators of Conservapedia.

The Conservapedia Commandments

Everything you post must be true and verifiable.

Always cite and give credit to your sources, even if in the public domain.

Edits/new pages must be family-friendly, clean, concise, and without gossip or foul language.

When referencing dates based on the approximate birth of Jesus, give appropriate credit for the basis of the date (B.C. or A.D.). "BCE" and "CE" are unacceptable substitutes because they deny the historical basis. See CE.

As much as is possible, American spelling of words must be used.

Do not post personal opinion on an encyclopedia entry. Opinions can be posted on Talk:pages or on debate or discussion pages.

Conservapedia's rules comprise these six "commandments". I am not making this up. The first two and number six are okay. The third is interesting — "family-friendly" being, of course, a buzzword in conservative Christian circles to describe content appropriate for children. The comment on "gossip" seems to reflect a continual source of frustration for Conservapedians — their complaint about Wikipedia's "gossip" is the twelfth item on their list of "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia" (which they proudly declare to be their most popular page.) Their example? Taken from Wikipedia's article on Nina Totenberg: "She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming." This is information about Ms. Totenberg's personal life, but it's not exactly what springs to my mind when I think about "gossip". Nevertheless, Conservapedia has taken a firm stand against it.

"The success of Fox news over every other news channel is because it is fair and balanced. It has many people on it who work to spread truth such as Sean Hannity who is a great American."
Conservapedia on Fox News

They're not kidding about their rule on conciseness — for an example, I clicked on "Random Page" until I found five actual articles (as opposed to category lists and the like.) Then I contrasted them with Wikipedia's corresponding pages. Wikipedia's page on saturated fat, for instance, contains ten paragraphs of text and two illustrations. Conservapedia's consists of this text: "A lipid made from fatty acids which have no double bonds between carbon atoms." Wow, that's concise. It's cited, too — the information was garnered from Jay L. Wile's seminal textbook, Exploring Creation With Biology. It seems there are actual textbooks on creationist biology! Conservapedia's entry on boiling point: "The temperature at which a specific substance boils." Again, points for conciseness! The entries on goods, Aurangzeb (the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire), and Santa Claus are a bit longer, at two, three, and a whopping nine sentences apiece. Instead of engaging in mean-spirited and potentially "gossipy" speculation on whether they actually needed a rule mandating conciseness, I'll just congratulate the folks at Conservapedia for adhering to their principles so well.

The fourth rule reflects their number one (and apparently biggest) complaint about Wikipedia: the use of "CE" and "BCE" rather than "BC" and "AD" in dates. Now, I'll admit to a little bias, since I normally use "BCE" and "CE" here on E2. Even so, the issue never struck me as a particularly important one. But to the folks at Conservapedia, the use of these 'politically correct' terms is symbolic of Wikipedia's overall desire to marginalize Jesus. In their words, "The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception." Wow, "the CE deception"! I bet it's right up there with that moon-landing hoax!

"Because Islam is an uncomplicated religion to live by, it is sure to continue in its popularity around the world."
Conservapedia on Islam

The real puzzler for me is rule five. Why do they mandate American-style spellings? Aren't there conservatives in the rest of the English-speaking world? It seems the fine folks at Conservapedia are actually offended by seeing British-style spelling in Wikipedia, which has no firm policy mandating one way or the other. You see, allowing both types of spelling reflects a subtle anti-American bias. If they weren't anti-American, they'd require American spellings, right?

Well, that's the sort of reasoning you see on Conservapedia. They claim Wikipedia is biased — in much the same way that right-wing pundits frequently claim the mainstream media are biased — because it doesn't push the particular ideology of the American conservative movement. Having no overarching rule mandating American spelling (what purpose would such a rule serve?), in their bizarre worldview, reflects anti-Americanism. Similarly, their page listing complaints about Wikipedia mentions their "bias" towards the Theory of Evolution (another case of the facts having that pesky liberal bias!) — when their own page on the subject is nothing but an anti-evolution screed the likes you'll find in any creationist manifesto, starting with an outright lie: the first section is entitled "Lack of Any Credible Transitional Forms".

"Embryonic stem cell research is the manipulation and destruction of human life shortly after conception in order to divide in a laboratory culture and produce specialized cells supposedly to treat disease."
Conservapedia on Stem cell research

No bias here

It's no surprise that both lefties and righties (and of course, folks who don't fit either category) have their own media devoted to political commentary from their own perspective. The right wing, however, is pretty much on its own when it comes to creating explicitly biased sources for "facts" carefully calculated to serve conservative interests. There's an old saw on the right about the "liberal media"; leaving aside the question of whether there's any truth to it, it's indisputable that whatever liberal bias exists in Wikipedia, it's nothing compared to the hard-right leanings of Conservapedia — hell, they stuck it in the name.

What's telling is that the conservative establishment has not attempted to create media free of bias — they've responded to this perceived leftist bias by creating media that are even more starkly biased in the other direction. There's something astonishing and sad about Conservapedia — the conservative movement in the United States has become so doctrinaire and so insular that they can't stomach the notion of an encyclopedia that doesn't explicitly embody their own politics, even down to making sure it says "color" instead of "colour". I'm considerably to the left of the center in American politics, but I don't need an encyclopedia that reminds me that same-sex marriage is good and right — so why do Conservapedians need a page on homosexuality that starts off quoting Biblical injunctions on homosexuality or tells them, "This has created an interest in the side issue whether homosexual behavior is or is not zoologically 'natural.' This is largely a sterile debate because behavior is not necessarily moral even if 'natural'"? Conservative Christians don't have any particular deficiency of memory as compared to the rest of us — do they really need to be reminded of their moral views at every juncture?

"[T]hese scientists are mostly liberal athiests, untroubled by the hubris that man can destroy the Earth which God gave him."
Conservapedia on global warming

One branch of my family is fundamentalist Christians. They're very good folks by any standard — they're charitable, kind people who care a lot about family and doing right according to the tenets of their faith. I respect that, even though I don't share many of their beliefs. I have no room to criticize the way they live their lives, and no desire to. But there's something I really don't understand about them. They only listen to contemporary Christian music. They don't read the newspaper or follow any of the news in the mainstream media — they only get their news from Christian sources.

Endeavoring to live apart from the outside world is a common practice among fundamentalist Christians (and among fundamentalist adherents to other religions as well.) Homeschooling, avoiding any kind of mainstream entertainment, refusing to associate with non-adherents — these are common practices among America's conservative Christians. My own fundamentalist relatives aren't quite that bad. They watch normal TV shows and movies and read normal books, so long as they don't think they express views explicitly counter to their own. But I've never heard them listen to music that wasn't explicitly Christian in its theme, or read news that isn't "Christian" news. Shouldn't the news be the same, whether you're Christian or not?

It's in that vein that Conservapedia was created — it's an encyclopedia with an explicitly right-wing, Christian character. It was founded by Andrew Schlafly, son of well-known Christian Conservative Phyllis Schlafly, and created in part by homeschooled students as an pedagogic exercise. I don't understand why conservatives want something like this in the first place. It's one thing to avoid media that express views actively antithetical to your own; I don't spend my time listening to Michael Savage and I don't tune into Bill O'Reilly on TV. But I also don't need to have my own views constantly reinforced by every media channel I use, either.

I'd like to end this with a quote that really says it all.

"Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood."

Thanks, Conservapedia.

References

Climb up on the Moon? Of course we did.	baramin	Alternatives to Everything2	Phyllis Schlafly
Stephen Colbert	Swift Boat Veterans for Truth	There are no transitional fossils	"CE" and "BCE" are inaccurate terms
"Dangerous chemicals": Absurd liberal myth	Wikipedia	I am not making this up	The homosexual agenda
wikitruth	Gonads and Strife	Michael Savage	you can't change the world, but you can change the facts
Contemporary Christian music	Nancy Grace	Bogey's Books, or An Exercise in British and American English	Fox News
Christian Fundamentalism	Why are you here?	Australia: Deadliest Place on Earth	September 1, 2007

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