Following an idea that occurred to me while being interviewed for an article on the Conservapedia, I tried replacing the inadequate page on the ACLU with the comprehensive Wikipedia entry. Before I had a chance to create an entry for Christianity by the same means, my account was blocked. Alas, the Conservapedia does not yet have an entry for Christianity at all. Perhaps someone could help out.
So much for my plan to replace the illustration of the Jesus entry with this one.
The experiment, of course, would have been to see how long the information from a supposedly liberal Wikipedia entry, an entry that's gone through a process of review for a neutral point of view, would survive the Conservapedia's editors. Apparently I violated one of the Conservapedia's commandments, but I'm not sure which one.
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The *real*, historical Jesus probably looked like an Arab, of course, given the part of the world where he lived... :)
On the other hand, it's probably considered just as sacreligious to suggest that Jesus wasn't blond and blue-eyed as it is to suggest that the USA isn't blessed by God to do whatever the hell it wants at any moment.
Paraphrasing (and perhaps summarizing) the Wikipedia entry might be a good move. We could then at least have a moderately controlled experiment and eliminate some variables: if they don't have "copyright violation" as an excuse, what will trip their anti-American sensors?
I haven't been to the Conservapedia yet, but I've been enjoying the chatter here on Scienceblogs. It's kind of amusing that they have chosen to create a wiki. These folks are, by nature, highly authoritarian. The whole philosophy behind wikis is that there is no need for a central authority. And never the twain shall meet.
I have to say it- Conservapedia is one of the most fascinating things currently happening on the internet- it's a surreal concoction of fantasy and deliberate satire on that fantasy, and self satire on top of that, to the most ultimate complete extent I've ever witnessed anywhere.
I feel like Foucault should be writing a book about this.
maybe I should elaborate- he should be writing a book about this because of the total fusion between satire and reality... it would go something kind of like the panoptican.. "The satire would be so complete as to render it's actual exercise unnecessary"
All you need to illustrate the bias of Conservapedia is its own page citing what it considers to be bias in Wikipedia...
http://www.conservapedia.com/Examples_of_Bias_in_Wikipedia
First understand that Wikipedia is an international site and therefore must use a standards for some things, such as measuring time, or spelling of a word.
Advertised as the most-viewed page on Conservapedia, it claims Wikipedia bias for reason such as:
-Wikipedia does not exercise any centralized authority over articles. Essentially, Wikipedia does not exercise editorial control over entries. Since such lack of editorial oversight is the STATED GOAL of Wikipedia, this is a non-issue.
-Use of BCE (Before the Common Era) and CE (Common Era) instead of BC and AD (anti-Christian bias, of course). Conservapedia seems to think we should impose the terms "Before Christ (BC)" and "Anno Dominis (AD, in the year of our lord)" in order to avoid an anti-Christian (and presumably, and anti-American) bias.
-Spelling 'labor' as 'labour' (Conservapedia refers to this a strong anti-American anti-capitalist bias)
-Spelling 'favor' as 'favour' (anti-US bias)
-Calls the entry on Nina Totenberg, as sounding like a gossipy National Enquirer article for including a passage that says "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."
-Claims that "Edits [to Wikipedia] to include facts against the theory of evolution are almost immediately censored." Doesn't provide any examples of the claimed "facts", or any examples where those "facts" were edited.
-Claims that a search for the terms "Moby" and "Song" (i.e. type Moby Song in the search box and the search will return 1075 (now actually 1151) articles, supposedly belying the Wikipedia claim of 1.5 million articles. This is untrue. Some of the returned results are minor variations that point to the same article. MOST are disparate articles that happen include both "Moby" and "Song" SOMEWHERE in their text. I don't think "Bandit Kings of Ancient China", which is a turn-based strategy game, has much to do with "Lift Me Up", which is a song by the artist known as Moby. Do a search for "Moby Song", quotes included in the search box and you get 24 results.
This is just a sample. Conservapedia offers 6 "commandments" as guides for posting. Two of the six seem to require a bias themselves (use of BCE and CE are "unacceptable" and "American" spellings are to be used). In effect, a third of the guidelines (restrictions) exist solely to exclude certain groups of contributors.
Garv
According to Conservapedia, there are two types of judicial activism practiced in the United States court system:
1. Liberal judges striking down laws that uphold core conservative American values.
2. Liberal judges refusing to strike down laws that subvert core conservative American values.
No other types are listed. I am thankful Conservapedia is now there to protect us from liberal bias. Thankfully Conservapedia is so impartial.
Looking forward to trolling Conservapedia in the future...
Garv
You may be interested to know that I was blocked by conservapedia as well -- within an hour of posting excerpts from a briefly lived blog I began on Haphazard Design -- which basically attempts to take Intelligent Design a step deeper, by asking, how else, besides "Intelligent" might we characterize this design? My position is that if the univers *is* the product of intelligent design, the quality is haphazard at best.... http://www.haphazard-design.blogspot.com/