Conservapedia

From Conservapedia

Conservapedia, launched on November 21, 2006, is a conservative, family-friendly Wiki encyclopedia. It was founded by teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly with the help of several students from his fall 2006 World History class. In May 2008, Schlafly and some of his homeschooled students appeared on the CBC news program The Hour (see: Videos on Conservapedia).

When a student handed in her paper using the date-markers “BCE” and "CE” from Wikipedia, Schlafly realized that Wikipedia, despite its claim of neutrality, contained bias against the achievements of Christianity and conservatism. Other occasions of liberal bias, including the reversion of factual edits about the 2005 Kansas Evolution Hearings, led to the creation and launch of Conservapedia.

Though Conservapedia originally contained mostly history articles, it has grown over several years to be a general reference, with information about history, math, science, politics, religion and other topics. It also contains debates, essays and educational resources.

In March 2007 it was picked up by the media, and faced a barrage of vandalism (See Examples of Moronic Vandalism by the "tolerant"). Ever since then, it has continued to grow, and has now had more than 866 million page views, and enjoys prominence on search engines.

During the 2016 U.S presidential election year, Conservapedia saw a major surge in web traffic. Post Donald Trump's election, Conservapedia continues to see a significant growth of web traffic.

1 Leadership
2 Educational atmosphere
3 Differences with Wikipedia
4 Influential editors and users
5 Impact
- 5.1 Conservapedia on atheism
6 Promoting Original Scholarship
7 See also
8 External links
9 References

Leadership[edit]

Unlike Wikipedia, which bills itself as a democratic system and ends up functioning as a mobocracy, Conservapedia employs a hierarchy based on a merit system.

Andrew Schlafly is the chief administrator and is the most prolific editor, followed by bureaucrats, administrators, and regular editors. Editors who contribute substantial content may be promoted to administrator and bureaucrat, or gain extra user rights such as blocking power and uploading images.

Educational atmosphere[edit]

Due to the existence of essays and debates on Conservapedia, and conventions such as the "90/10 rule" and the use of real names, Conservapedia successfully fosters an educational environment. Because liberal bias is not allowed, much information that would be elsewhere censored can be found on Conservapedia; often it is one of the only places to find such information in one place.

Differences with Wikipedia[edit]

Conservapedia strives to keep its articles concise, informative, family-friendly, and true to the facts, which often back up conservative ideas more than liberal ones. Rather than claim a neutral point of view and then insert bias, Conservapedia is clear that it seeks to give due credit to conservatism and Christianity. Schlafly said in regard to the point of view issue, "It's impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral. I mean let's take a point of view, let's disclose that point of view to the reader." ^[1]

Wikipedia articles may contain trivia, gossip, profanity, and even pornographic/sexually explicit images. The latter three are prohibited on Conservapedia and trivia is largely discouraged.

The administrative hierarchy prevents Conservapedia from being hijacked by a faction, and thus preserves it from mobocracy, as discussed above.

Conservapedia has come up with a key wiki metric that measures tolerance/intolerance at a wiki. Namely, the edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki which measures the close-mindedness/intolerance and groupthink of a wiki. Mathematically, the edits to blocked editor accounts ratio can be expressed as: Edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki = E % BE, where E is the number of edits to the wiki and BE equals the number of blocked editor accounts of the wiki. The edits to blocked editor accounts ratio was partly inspired by Andrew Schlafly's essay Quantifying Openmindedness. Unlike Conservapedia, Wikipedia does not have a policy where members of the public are free to set up debate pages and engage in vigorous debate where the debate pages are lightly moderated (see: Conservapedia debates pages).

Influential editors and users[edit]

Aschlafly is the username of the aforementioned founder of Conservapedia, Andrew Schlafly. He has contributed massively to Conservapedia since the beginning, authored many articles including the student lectures, and is the final authority on article content and user conduct.

Karajou was one of the original three who joined at the beginning of the influx in February 2007, amid massive media attention, and has been an extraordinary contributor ever since. The cartoons and many of the military history entries are his superb work.

Ed Poor, active at Conservapedia for many years, and at Wikipedia for more than seven years, was the first elected bureaucrat at Wikipedia and has been extremely influential at both sites. At Conservapedia, he has primarily aimed at accuracy, rationality, and user cooperation.

The Conservative account has contributed the majority of content to the extremely popular Atheism, evolution, and homosexuality articles. The first two articles were featured as articles of the year at Conservapedia. The PNN News and Ministry Network produced a video entitled Viral article deals major blow to atheism. The book Atheist Persona: Causes and Consequences by John J. Pasquini, Th.D, cites cites Conservapedia's Causes of atheism article several times. ^[2] The Freedom From Atheism Foundation has featured several Conservapedia atheism articles on their Facebook page. There has been major Christian ministries/conservative organizations which have linked to Conservapedia atheism related content. In addition, User: Conservative created the Conservapedia resources Resources on becoming a Christian. The User: Conservative account is responsible for the invention of the Edits to blocked editor accounts ratio at a wiki which measures the tolerance/intolerance of a wiki.

1990'sguy has created much important content, including the highly-viewed Donald Trump achievements article series, content on nationalism and globalism, and European conservative-populist parties and leaders.

DavidB4 has expanded countless articles on computers and technology, and he runs two important bots on Conservapedia.

Joaquín Martínez has contributed a large amount of content about the arts, such as pages on literature, sculpture, and painting. He created the galleries of artwork which are featured on Conservapedia's Main page as the "Masterpiece of the Week". His work has helped beautify the encyclopedia.

Jpatt has more than 13,000 edits and 2,000 blocks, and is phenomenal in identifying good stories and posting headlines for them.

TerryH, a fabulous writer and biblical scholar who graduated from Yale, has broken big stories here in addition to translating some of the Bible.

User:Chippeterson has been a brilliant editor of numerous political entries.

TK made many substantive contributions and was known for his vigilance against vandals (RIP).

DeanS helped found the Conservapedia news project, and he is its main contributor. He has also worked on articles related to Mormonism.

SharonS has been an editor since the very beginning of Conservapedia, and was interviewed and quoted in a newspaper article to explain and defend the project.

AddisonDM works on maintenance, and in addition to neutral contributions has created the popular article Examples of Moronic Vandalism by the "tolerant", as well as the Conservapedia article itself.

RobSmith Created some of Conservapedia's most acclaimed and trafficked articles such as the European migrant crisis article, documenting the Russiagate hoax since 2017, and is a tireless researcher on the Socialist /Communist agendas along with being a vandal fighter.

RJJensen has a PhD in American Studies and has been a professor of history and political science at numerous schools. Professor Jensen has made significant contibutions to Conservapedia's historical articles.

Iduan has thousands of edits and his work on Templates has been particularly noteworthy.

JacobB is a gifted mathematician who has been invaluable to many of those entries.

Impact[edit]

Conservapedia has been praised and ridiculed in the media, on blogs, and on rival sites. Critics claim that it contains fringe viewpoints, while supporters note that it simply provides another viewpoint and an alternative to liberal bias.

Conservapedia provides information about the American people that liberal critics would rather hide: for example, nearly 50 percent of Americans reject evolution and embrace creationism, and even more want creationism taught alongside evolution in school. ^[3] Another example is the fact that atheists- often claiming to be more equipped to help their fellow men than religious people- actually give less to charity than believers, even when church giving is excluded.

Search results for controversial subjects such as atheism and evolution contain Conservapedia links within a few searches and often on the first page.^[4]^[5]

Many biographical articles contain religious references and information about the person’s religion, much more so than Wikipedia. Editor and college student Tasha Jones, (Taj) said of this aspect, “It gives me a better understanding of how people feel religion relates to our lives.” ^[6]

Conservapedia is active in political advocacy. For example, it chartered a bus for the 2009, 2010, and 2011 March for Life.

Conservapedia on atheism[edit]

The Conservapedia atheism article has been well-received by theists, major Christian YouTube channels and has received other favorable reviews (see: Public commentary on Conservapedia's atheism article). The Freedom From Atheism Foundation has featured Conservapedia atheism content on their Facebook page which receives a considerable amount of social media traffic.

Conservapedia has one the largest collection of articles on atheism on the internet. Its main atheism article and its collection of atheism articles (mainly created using the User: Conservative account) have both received a considerable amount of web traffic. See: Conservapedia:Atheism articles statistics

Conservapedia has over 1,900+ atheism related articles, essays and humor/satire pieces.

From 2006-2016, negative views about atheism in the United States have sharpened (see: Essay:Views on atheists).^[7]

Promoting Original Scholarship[edit]

Many pages tagged as essays are really more like projects, or are otherwise thought-provoking, giving Conservapedia some characteristics of a think tank. See Best New Conservative Words, The Coming Fifth Great Awakening in America, Top Causes of Rejecting Conservativism, Why Do Non-Conservatives Exist?, Disputed Biblical Translations, and Linguistic Analysis of Candidates.

External links[edit]

Videos on Conservapedia:

v • d • e Conservapedia

Rules and Resources	Commandments • College Guidance • Guidelines • Manual of Style • Index * Footnotes - technical help

Projects and Concepts	Best of the Public • Censorability • Best New Conservative Words and Conservapedia's Law • PLINO

Online Courses	American History • World History • Economics • American Government • Writing Lectures

Media	Articles • Debate Topics • Essays • Videos