The Corpus Callosum

What Are Conservatives *Really* Interested In?

Posted by Joseph j7uy5 on November 20, 2007
(5)
More »

Here is a part of a screenshot, showing the most-viewed
pages:

i-94d98527d0a5ed87b17105f4a8495c81-conservapedia-most-viewed.JPG

Notice that the page on homosexuality has 78% as many visits
as the main page.  The site?   rel="tag" href="http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics">Conservapedia:
“The Trustworthy Encyclopedia.”  It is a wiki, like href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page" rel="tag">Wikipedia,
but for conservatives.



See the entire screenshot href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/conservapedia-screenshot.JPG">here.

This was posted on href="http://politics.reddit.com/info/611rb/comments/">Reddit
with the caption “What Are Conservatives
*Really* Interested In? Conservapedia Statistics Reveal
All…” 

It may be tempting to view this as a reflection of conservative
hypocrisy, but it would not be valid to draw that conclusion. 
It does not tell us what conservatives are really interested in,
because we have no way of knowing the affiliation of the visitors.
 We do not know what is generating all those clicks.  

So persons looking for evidence of conservative hypocrisy will need to href="http://foxnewsporn.com/">look a bit more.

(5)
More »

Comments

  1. #1 Ex-drone
    November 20, 2007

    Did you notice any Conservapedia viewers in the discussion section tapping their keys and flashing their mouse cursors to attract the attention of other same-sex viewers so that they could go away together to a chat room?

  2. #2 Joshua Zelinsky
    November 20, 2007

    Not to rain on the parade, but their are a variety of problems with these numbers. First, there was a group of pranksters who made a deliberate program to refresh Conservapedia pages at a steady rate to mess with their viewing rates. I don’t know if that is still active, but if it is then this data is completely inaccurate. Second, a number of their articles (especially on homosexuality and evolution) have been linked to by both far right groups and by people making fun of them. Since the articles on those topics are largely controlled by their sysop Conservative ( http://www.conservapedia.com/User:Conservative ) who is wacko even by Conservapedia standards (he was spouting stuff on the Pharyngula comments page a while back with a variety of sockpuppets. He was driven off of Wikipedia – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Kdbuffalo_2 for this amazing attempt to reason with him ). The point is that when people want to laugh at Conservapedia they go to these pages. The bottom line is that I wouldn’t trust these numbers to represent what the editors their actually care about.

  3. #3 Mark
    November 21, 2007

    Perhaps they were seeking cures for those nasty little afflictions they have managed to pick up somehow :-)

  4. #4 Joshua Zelinsky
    November 21, 2007

    It appears pretty well-confirmed at this point that these numbers aren’t accurate. See the comments thread at http://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/21/by-their-fruits-shall-ye-know-them/

  5. #5 Brandon
    November 21, 2007

    As simultaneously hilarious and disgusting that list is, the “What are Conservatives Really Interested In?” line bothers me a whole lot more. Those conservatives sure love to stereotype people!

    The fact that you can find stuff like this and not use it to insult an entire group of people is why you’re on my RSS list.