Conservapedia: The Latest Dumb Idea From the Separatist Right
By Erick Posted in Culture — Comments (40) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
In all of the dumb ideas to come out of the right, perhaps Conservapedia is the dumbest. Billed as "a conservative encyclopedia you can trust," it is destined to fail miserably to expand outside the clutches of a few conservative cultists.
Wikipedia has succeeded because it has been open and accessible to all. Anyone of any political persuasion can participate in building and growing Wikipedia, not so with conservapedia -- though it may claim otherwise. Wikipedia, now commonly cited in judicial opinions and other works of note around the nation, does have a liberal bias, but only because of the participants. Conservapedia has the potential to draw away from Wikipedia the conservatives who choose to participate there, while failing to gain popular traction due to its very name -- an upfront banner of separatist conservative anxiety against the liberal biases of an online encyclopedia anyone can edit.
It's a bad idea. Conservapedia, attempting to justify itself lists 32 examples of bias at Wikipedia including such horrors as:
Read on . . .
Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception.
and
Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation." Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.
How dreadful.
I do not deny that wikipedia has a liberal bias. It certainly does, as does modern academia. But conservatives do themselves and the public a disservice by walling themselves off. Christ said to the apostles, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,"* not "wall yourselves off from the world and only talk to each other."
Conservapedia is a dumb idea.
*I looked up "The Great Commission" on Wikipedia to make sure I had the quote right.
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Conservapedia: The Latest Dumb Idea From the Separatist Right 40 Comments (0 topical, 40 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Would be for conservatives to engage Wikipedia, and edit entries more frequently. Last year, Conrad Burns's entry was one paragraph of biographical info, and pages of ethics and corruption scandals. Tom Kean's reported that he was gay, until I brought it to the Kean campaign's attention (why on earth did *I* have to do that?). Like it or not, Wikipedia is fast becoming the major source for information on the internet; conservatives are much more likely to be successful joining rather than beating it.
And at least its better than DKospedia (snicker).
Don't run away from them! :-)
I don't think that anyone who has engaged me in combat here at RedState will be much surprised that that's the attitude that I take. LOL
I think we need to be more clever. To use political neutral names like the Siera Club. The mistake with Conservapedia is the name. The idea of taking back the culture one piece at a time is exactly right.
You can't take back the culturally-dominating institutions that the lefties have hijacked if you're just going to hole up in your own little world.
Run like Reagan!
I'm not sure we can take back specific organizations. But like Fox News, we can begin to create alternatives. If you make something like that overtly political by what you name it, it will turn people off. That is why I have a problem with the name, but not their concept.
Having an ideological encyclopedia is not a good idea.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I think it's as ridiculous as dKosopedia which it is obviously a response to.
Fragmenting public knowledge this way according to partisanship is a terrible decision and it's something that Markos Moultisas Zuniga was responsible for beginning. I don't want to emulate him.
And actually, because they are still fair, people should call projects like dKosopedia a modern-day, internet-driven example of Lysenkoist thinking, with Maoist overtones, built on a substrate of Marxist "infinite perfectability."
Let's not make the mistake of following this hideous mishmash of an example, no matter how attractive it looks in phosphor.
Certainly it's a terrible idea. But to make your case was it necessary to pretend the examples of bias at wikipedia are insignificant? The second one points out that there is no mention of Christianity as an influence of the Renaissance. That's hardly a trivial oversight.
Your case is easy to make. Conservapedia is bad idea all around. But you undermine the extent of bias at wikipedia with your article.
As I mentioned in the blog about this, we need a clearinghouse of conservative information, but this is the wrong way to go about it. We don't need a conservative view of the entire world, just the conservative take on the major issues of the present and past, and a list of the KnownFacts(tm) with our rebuttals to them, so that we can swat trolls with that info when they appear.
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Internet member since 1987
Member of the Surreality-Based Community
So they use the English spellings of the English language. How dare they? And if somebody doesn't like a wiki article they can edit it. How hard is that?
the authors were themseles British. Wikipedia has a single English language version to which any English speaker can contribute.
God bless you if that's what you believe, but I fail to see how it's "conservative".
Creation Science is a metaphysical belief which is at odds with science, no matter how vigorously its proponents deny it.
<soapbox>
I imagine that a dictionary definition of 'conservative' is to preserve things as they are. Your examples -- such as saying "so what" to BCE/CE dating -- are saying "but don't conserve *that*.
More to the point is *whose* scope for conservative gets used -- what do we want to maintain, and what will we let go?
Let's stick to the BCE/CE bit for a while. For about 1600 years it has been BC/AD, with reference to the human appearance of Jesus Christ. But just recently the change to BCE/CE is made.
Is the change made because the era truly is common? Common era for whom? China, who has so many more people that perhaps they should define what is common? The Moslem world, with their billion? Or even the Jewish world? It prefers a date from Moses.
And what is it that make 1CE == 1AD? Wouldn't that be Jesus again?
Or is it that the phrase "year of the Lord" is what is offensive to people? If so, then come out and be honest about it.
Maybe what I want to conserve is a society steeped in a Christian worldview.
Now suppose you are in charge of defining what is "conservative" and get to tell the "Christian worldview" people to take a hike. What would remain of the "conservative movement" wouldn't fill a Volkswagen.
</soapbox>
On a more practical point, haven't you read 1984? If you get to define the terms of the language, or of the culture, then you can warp it as you will. And whether changing the language (CE) or how terms are presented (one-side bias in the textbooks or Wikipedia) then you will lose the culture to those gatekeepers. So how do you compete? Either by taking over (witness the success of LGF vs. Digg -- LGF can't win that one) or by putting up your own institutions. If Conservapedia is ridiculous, then I suppose you are in favor of the Fairness in Media act, and assume that Rush should apply for a job at CNN.
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: 'Slippery' Jim DiGriz
I think most conservatives would agree that our time and resources are better spent on other endeavors.
I don't support the idea of a "conservapedia", but that's primarily because I find the "open" -pediae to be unreliable on anything but very trivial and uncontroversial topics (although they have some value as aggregators of primary sources for further research).
But, given the vitriol in your post I am curious about something: do you also consider the Fox and FoxNews networks as "dumb idea[s] from the Separatist Right" because they were created as new entities emphasizing a conservative viewpoint instead of the result of working within the existing dominant CBS / NBC / CBS / CNN / etc. networks to convert them to a more evenhanded outlook?
Fox News regularly brings on liberal columnists like Mara Liasson from NPR and many others to challenge their views. And FOX television in general is about as far from "right wing" as you can get -- remember, they made The Simpsons what they are today.
EVERYBODY is biased these days. The financial markets are the most accurate providers of information. Watch what the markets are doing and you'll have a better grasp of the facts than you can get from FoxNews, CNN, or MSNBC.
Funny, it seems to me the Simpsons has gotten more obnoxiously left-wing the longer it's gone on. Yes, once upon a time they made great episodes like one where Homer got a gun. You know, where in the end, it's the armed populace that peacefully prevents crime?
But just look at how Ned Flanders has gone from the nicest guy in Springfield, to a caricature of a Religious Rightist right out of the Huffington Post.
Run like Reagan!
Over this MyDD post the other day, by Matt Stoller.
Howard Dean, that most bipartisan-spirited man of political means, has expressed his outrage in the past and in the present that FOX News even exists. As I remember, he was on the record during the 2004 campaign as saying that he'd regulate them out of existence because he didn't like them.
FOX has a very good news and editorial policy and if you don't like it, there's plenty of other cable and satellite bandwidth available. LINK TV, for instance, which nobody complains about.
I don't read MyDD, so it's unliklely that anything written there would outrage me. You have a vivid imagination to have interpreted my comment as meaning I'm upset about a Howard Dean quote on Matt Stoller's site.
Erick took a shot at conservapedia as "The Latest Dumb Idea From the Separatist Right" not because of it's unimpressive appearance or poor quality of content, but because the people behind it chose not to work within the existing dominant framework of Wikipedia:
I do not deny that wikipedia has a liberal bias. It certainly does, as does modern academia. But conservatives do themselves and the public a disservice by walling themselves off. Christ said to the apostles, "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations,"* not "wall yourselves off from the world and only talk to each other."
Conservapedia is a dumb idea.
I don't agree that this is universally the best tack to take, and I offered Fox as a counterexample to see if Erick agreed. I think that there are times when it's useful to work within an existing framework to push your ideas, but there are also times when it's more productive to build a new, competing framework.
As another example, despite DailyKos being an ostensibly "open" website which claims to allow polite and rational dissenting conservative viewpoints, the founders of RedState still decided to create an alternative site because it was a better use of their time and energy than trying to build a conservative community within DailyKos. Yet I doubt Erick considers himself part of The Separatist Right for having created a conservative/Republican focused website.
Sure, there are many other endeavors out there for conservatives to engage in, but let's not underestimate the potential of the Internet to influence people's minds. In my own experience, I've known some friends and colleagues who are heavily uninformed on the issues at present. So, when they try to find out more by going on a site like Wikipedia, they are unknowingly receiving biased information, which they then assume to be correct. This may not be so significant when it's just between a small group of people, but in terms of our society, I think it's having more of an impact that we recognize.
If you think that's a real problem, then the answer is to go fix Wikipedia itself, I say.
Run like Reagan!
Wikipedia articles *can* be altered by anyone, but in general the group-think rules the roost. And there are a lot of otherwise unemployed people checking articles there (don't they have real jobs?).
By way of reference, LittleGreenFootballs has been trying to get its articles listed on Digg for a short while now. There is an organized campaign going on to deliberately hide the LGF articles. Wouldn't it be easier to drive the LGF articles to some site that doesn't let people delibrately bury news articles? Perhaps. Can *you* afford the effort to beat down these buriers? Or is your time better spent on a replacement site/medium? I think the latter, and that reforming (public schools | Wikipedia | Digg) is a waste of effort.
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Never buy a dog and bark for yourself: 'Slippery' Jim DiGriz
For me the question is primarily one of audience and intent. What is to be gained by conservapedia, and who is the audience? I say nothing to be gained, and the audience is people who aren't taken in by the biased articles at wikipedia anyway.
I do, however, strongly agree that wikipedia can't be fixed. I composed a post earlier that I never posted to the effect that fixing wikipedia (or replacing it) is, to me, like "fixing" a leak by constantly cleaning up the water.
when I tell them that Wikipedia is not an acceptable reference source. They are stunned to learn that Wikipedia entries might not be true. I also tell them this is especially the case with political entries, where people who have an agenda sometimes alter pages to serve that agenda.
I then point out that the internet itself is a great resource, but one which requires considerable care to use effectively. Otherwise, we'd all be millionaires thanks to honourable colleages who send us many e-mails.
The point is that the fault is not so much with Wikipedia, but ourselves.
If there’s a topic I’m not familiar with, it’s usually pretty handy for getting a start and I usually click the “discussion” section to see what kind of revisions or omissions there may be. It’s usually a good place for finding links to more solid sources but I’d be very cautious about relying on it.
As far as the perceived “bias,” I’m just not seeing it. It’s an open-source site where people can pretty much edit as they see fit and of the times I’ve looked in the discussion section, they seem to bend over-backwards to be as neutral as possible. While I don’t doubt that if you look long and hard enough (it’s a huge site), you can find examples of “bias” if you’re predisposed to finding it.
“Conservipedia” from what I’ve seen of it sounds like a pretty dumb idea. We have enough of a problem with conservatives regurgitating “known facts” that they heard from a conservative pundit or using op-ed pieces or distorting liberal positions to argue against a straw man. I see little value in creating a conservative echo-chamber that feeds the victimization mentality.
I'm not a South Park Republican, I'm a King of the Hill libertarian.
Yeah, I often use Wikipedia to do research, but you can't trust it enough to cite it. Search, then verify.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
For matters of long settled fact. Anything thats hot I wouldn't even use it as a starting point.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I use it all the time. It's not a terrible starting point, or looking up a quick fact. And it is updated much more quickly than most reference materials. But it should not be considered authoritative. I just checked the Walter Lippmann entry--it was rather poorly written and disjointed. It cited three secondary sources. It was, in the end, practically useless. A far superior entry can be found in the Dictionary of American Biography, which just about any library should have.
It did have a decent set of links, much better than what you'd get with Google.
I usually start out my mornings by checking the news on The Register, a lefty British techie site if ever there was one. For at least a year now they've been going on about how impossible it is to find truly reliable information on Wikipedia because the correction process has become so insular it is impossible to ensure factual information is posted to the site. Conservadpedia may or may not be a stupid idea, but I don't think it is any more stupid than Wikipedia itself.
Erick wrote:
"I do not deny that wikipedia has a liberal bias. It certainly does, as does modern academia."
Do not forget about the media's liberal bias. Or Hollywood. Or international opinion.
Or reality, now that I think of it.
Darn reality! Why can't you be objective, like conservative fantasies!
Oh, and by the way, if you think Conservapedia to be the dumbest idea to come out of the right, you really need to get out more.
For example, "The Scotter Libby Trial was Unjust" idea just passed it on the dumb scale without breaking a sweat.
Peace,
Monkey Faced Liberal
Oh monkey faced liberal, your wit is so biting, your sarcasm so pure. Why, you are a virtual virtuoso of acerbic bloggy snark. Oh how your little monkey fingers must be trembling with the uber joy of your righteousness, your victorious pointy-sticked jab. It is to laugh.
Simply marvelous. Buh-bye now.
that pain you will feel soon .....
" in the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years."
Abe Lincoln
Boy, we've had some winners here lately. Go fling poo somewhere else.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill
There's a fascinating book by the historian Richard J. Evans, on a prominent 20th-century political figure who famously described his ideology as "reality-based." Do look it up: I believe it just went into paperback.
As a wise man named Erick Erickson once noted, you cannot argue with people who claim to own reality.
We are but warriors for the working-day.
If we were talking about a Wiki of conservative arguments and responses to liberal arguments. That could be useful. As an alternative to a general interest encyclopedia like Wikipedia, it makes no sense at all.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman
for joining "Conservapedia" on my Wikipedia editor account. I flipped over there, looked at a couple of the FOX News articles, and came back and said "no thanks".
Conservatives shouldn't give up on Wikipedia. When you see bias, change it. I do, and when I can defend my changes, it almost always holds.
The persecution complex, which is instilled by some at an early age.