Andrew Sullivan, whom I laud pretty frequently on this blog, linked yesterday to a website that is absolutely, incredibly hilarious.
It's called conservapedia.com, and it is what it sounds like, a "conservative" wikipedia. According to the site, it wants to give an alternative to the liberal bias of Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a liberal bias, you ask? Naturally. Here's a great entry from the "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia page."
For example, even though most Americans reject the theory of evolution,[6] Wikipedia editors commenting on the topic are nearly 100% pro-evolution.Uh huh. I had a great time scrolling through conservapedia and I learned a lot.
Did you know, for example, that "Big Oil has also proven valuable in funding independant [sic] scientists who are able to dispute the propaganda behind Global warming without worrying about losing their government or academic funding due to liberal reprisals."
Or did you know that only Christians have "faith." No foolin, it actually says that.
But my favorite entry is on the cactus. I don't know how I stumbled on to this entry, but it is truly wonderful. I'll give you the first couple paragraphs.
The secularist view of the Cactaceae is that they are roughly two million years old, and that they have evolved exclusively in the new world. This view fails to explain, however, how it is that the Opuntia genus is native to the island of Opus, near Greece. Cacti are known for their high content of alkaloids, and have often been used in the sacramental rights of the Native Americans. Because of this, the early Catholic missionaries in the west thought the plants to be the work of Satan, and this is perhaps a preferable view to that of materialistic evolution since it is difficult to imagine how something like mescaline could have evolved by natural selection. Besides that, the psychoactive content of many cacti have inspired the writings of such ungodly men as Aldous Huxley and Albert Hoffman.Several species of cactus are now endangered in the west due to "poaching" by collectors and invasive species. But, since Genesis suggests that man has been given dominion over all of the earth, the environmentalist concerns on this note are entirely inappropriate. It may also be that environmentalists, in addition to flauting the Word of God, are merely concerned about the effects that declining cactus populations will have on their supply of mescaline.
Obviously, going to conservapedia is a place to learn valuable stuff.
I have been reading Andrew Sullivan for a good long time now and I have a great deal of respect for him, most especially his attempts to separate conservatism from fundamentalism. (I'm currently reading his "The Conservative Soul" which makes some impassioned arguments for a conservatism founded on doubt and skepticism.) Websites like conservapedia.com show how much work he is going to have separating a true conservative movement from the fundamentalist Christian base.
No wonder the New York Times is reporting that fundamentalists like Falwell and Robertson and having a hard time finding a candidate to support. How many people can have an honest shot at the Presidency who believe that environmentalists only want to save cactuses to keep their mescaline supply stable?
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Although there are lots of funny original entries there, you should know that everybody and their mother has been vandalizing the Conservapedia for a little while now.
The joke entries tend to use better English than the true ones.
It's definitely been vandalized all to hell. But most of the vandalism is of a subtle Colbertian sort. Outright vandalism just gets removed, so a lot of people have been adding hilarious pseudo-Conservative entries. There was a thread on the Something Awful forums about doing exactly this.
I think this says it all:
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andrew sullivan is about a week late, as he is with most things.
How would those vandalizing CP feel if it were Wikipedia being vandalized? Should we have expected anything other than implicitly supporting or even explicitly supporting vandalism from those who've posted on this (BoingBoing, JonSwift, Wonkette, etc.)?
Why are "liberals" so quick to defend WP? Can their implicit or explicit claim that WP is unbiased be trusted?
In case anyone thought those simply mocking CP had any class and the ability to analyze issues in depth before, hopefully this incident will have disabused them of that notion.
Gotta be a hoax. Note the blogroll containing Violent Acres, the Mother Teresa of cyberspace.
Yeah, I'm soooo disabused.
Poor conservatives. They run the country into hell, get us mired in a war and then they bitch when people poke fun at their idiocy.
As Colbert has said, "Reality has a well known liberal bias" and it seems to be more and more true.
It smells like a hoax to me.
But there's a lot of irony in claiming Wikipedia has a "liberal bias". The largest donor to Wikipedia is the conservative Lounsbery Foundation - which funds global warming skeptics and other fellow-travelers. The Foundation is headed by David Abshire, a Reagan-era high-ranking Republican.
I think if you take a look at my piece on Conservapedia, you can see it's a very serious endeavor.
If WP didn't have a "liberal" bias, one might expect a bit smaller outrage against competitors or those who claim it has such a bias.
And, while I don't have any figures, I'm going to guess that WP editors are majority "liberal", due to the presumption that they're majority young rather than old. Considered in the aggregate, that will tend to make most edits "liberal".
WP's policies also favor MSM sources and strongly disfavor "self-published" sources. By doing so they favor largely "liberal" MSM/mainstream thinking.
Here's a fun challenge to bloggers:
1. Someone other than me condemn the vandalism that "liberals" have wrought on CP.
2. Which links at WP don't have the nofollow tag, where do those lead, and how much would that be worth to the receiving sites in the open market?
In fairness, I think the page is a satire. It was created just last Thursday. The claim that Opuntia, aka the prickly pear, comes from near Greece is way out in left field. And the picture of two very similar species of catii with the conclusion that it's impossible they're related.
But that final paragraph is the real clincher.
On the other hand, the natives believe that the Saguaro are the incarnations of their ancestors. Because Intelligent Design endows the required designer with no attributes other than intelligence (it need only be an intelligent agent), the view that the giant Saguaro are reincarneted ancestors of the native population is a preferable scientific explanation to that of Darwinian evolution.
The fact of the matter is that every blog that criticizes Conservapedia uses the same articles as examples over and over, yet they fail to mention that these articles are the result of vandalism. Mistake, I think not. Idiocy on the part of incompetent blogs, very possible.
heh what a dumb story about the cactus , just as dumb as the origins of the kangaroo
http://www.conservapedia.com/Kangaroo
To the comment above , vandalism on conservepedia? Conservepedia is an rape of wiki, thats worse!
I saw this somewhere on the web and it speaks volumes.
"Advocacy of Intelligent Design (ID) is indistinguishable from parody of ID".
Such is much of conservapedia. I just cannot tell the difference between the parody and the delusional rants from the christian mythologists.
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