dimmnitude

[solarbird]

"Conservapedia" is, I think, already being pretty well knocked about, but it really is a lollercoaster. Almost half its front page consists entirely of attacks on Wikipedia, and on apolitical topics, the best writing I've found is at the fifth grade report level. Here, compare and contrast:

Conservapedia on Beowulf
Wikipedia on Beowolf

I also like how its contributors quote FOX News as a scientific source. It's kind like the "Mirror, Mirror" Wikipedia, only instead of evil, it's stupid.

Comments

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Unlike Wikipedia, Conservapedia does not have a dedicated staff to keeping the site monitored. Take a look at the page on Evolution. It's hilarious, mostly because The Panda's Thumb (http://pandasthumb.org) and other groups have made it a lovely target. The point of the game now is to write stuff that is actually a parody of the Intelligent Design position, but is written in such a way that the ideologues one the right will nod their heads and say, "Yes, that sounds right."

Conservapedia is rapidly becoming a target for one big art project.

[solarbird]

That's why - in a desperately misguided attempt to be fair - I linked to an article that was tagged as "completed" and had not so targeted.

I mean, if I'd wanted to play dirty, I'd have just pointed out that as of 20 December 2006, the entry on Adolf Hitler, in its entirety, was: "Adolf Hitler was a very brutal dictator of Germany with the dream of taking over the world. He killed and sent to concentration camps millions of Jews." Presumably in that order.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Yup, gotta love the left, going and pretty much using organized tactics to deny the right their voice in any debate. Of course as in all things eventually the right will get sick of it and will start to use the same tactics on the left, who will then whine and scream about how 'unfair' it is. It's currently happening on Digg now, it's amusing to watch the folks on the left actually organizing to stop people from the right from getting their articles posted.

Because after all, debate is bad and opposing viewpoints must be stamped out.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Seriously man, you don't have much of a leg to stand on these days.

Just the other day someone made light of Neocons hating Wikipedia, calling it unreliable (while ignoring the fact that when sources are given people can, you know, follow the links), but I didn't realize how true it was until I saw Conservapedia.

It's clear to me one of the biggest problems the Neocons have with Wiki isn't that some of the info may not be reliable (though, again, sources? Hello?), it's the fact that Wiki is not a traditional encyclopedia.

Wasn't that, you know, part of the whole POINT of Wikipedia in the first place?

They whine that it includes gossip, alternate spellings of words, is supposedly anti-Christianity because of the way they use dates, etc. So what? Since when was a notation that there was a boating accident or somesuch tantamount to it being something out of the National Enquirer? The rest is about as meaningful.

The weirdest thing is that they complain non-Americans have a hand in Wikipedia. I don't think I even need to say one word about why that says as much as it does.

Hell, if you want a traditional encyclopedia, go buy one. Don't give some flimsy excuses that Wikipedia is this, is not that, and act like you need some so-called fair, unbiased alternative - which is by nature biased for the simple reason it exists solely as a counter to Wiki! At the least, don't just ape their design for your version of it.

Wikipedia, to me, is entertaining. It's useful for a lot of obscure information that's not easily found in one place anywhere else. I use it more for some sports, games and so on. If I want to know more about important stuff and have the info supported, I can go to other places - or, as already noted, follow the sources that are linked to. I know there's more out there than just Wikipedia.

I guess that makes me different from some people.

But seriously - drop this "the left is trying to silence the right" bullshit, man. It's weak.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Dude, everything you wrote had absolutely NOTHING to do with my point. Please, don't go replying to me just for the sake of trying to 'overwhelm me' with your noise. Any site that doesn't toe the liberal line gets defaced and harrassed by liberals, and as Elf pointed out, they're (sometimes) organized attacks. I've been watching it for years on sites like /. and more recently on places like digg.

Now the pendulum is starting to swing the other way on a few of those sites and the entrenched liberals are screaming bloody murder and asking the site admins to ban all these 'new people' for having 'inccorrect attitudes.'

And your reply is just another perfect example of this behavior. Drown out the guy with the politically incorrect opinions.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Would you like a handkerchief?

[loopback.livejournal.com]

Funny crying from someone who can say things like this about people whose opinions they disagree with:

"Yup, we've become a nation of pussies and cowards. We don't raise many men in Amerca anymore, nor do we raise many people of principle. Diversity sucks, not all ideas are created equal, and moral equivilence is Bull Shit. There is a right and wrong, and yes most of the world IS black and white."

If there's a right and a wrong, and you're right, why should anyone give you or your opinions the time of day? You don't seem to extend that same courtesy to anyone you disagree with.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

The thing there - no, most of the world is, in fact, not black and white. I see a lot of people who have trouble getting past this, but people who see the world in black and white will never change.

Banner has been an exercise in hypocrisy for a long, long time.

[banner.livejournal.com]

Who's crying? I have no idea what your point is. At all.

I don't force people to have my opinion. I don't dogpile on them with all my friends. I don't make threats against their life. I don't harrass them constantly. I just say what I believe and move on.

But, you know, quite a few of you, even here do. Right down to the threats.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Let's see who ended the comment with "Drown out the guy with the politically incorrect opinions."

That would be you.

If that's not crying, it's whining, complaining, kvetching, whatever. If you're going to say it, don't duck away from it when someone calls you on it.

Further, it has nothing to do with you being politically incorrect or not. It has everything to do with the things you say just being ridiculously absurd.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

One more thing (tired of me yet?):

You complain (observe, note, whatever) that you don't dogpile on people with your friends, etc. - then you say it's happening here.

If you mean HERE here, as in solarbird's journal, what in the world did you expect? She has a number of different views than you. So do a lot of her friends. I'd expect if you offer your opinion here, you're going to find more people who disagree with you than there'd be in your own journal. It's not piling on when multiple people choose to tell you what they think about your opinion. What, should they just elect one person to speak for them?

I may scan your journal sometimes out of curiosity to see what new, silly thing you'll say, but you won't find me leaving comments to you there. Here? That's different.

As for the threats, who's threatened you here?

[foibos.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I think Banner should sue himself for slander, 'cause, man, the guy that writes his LJ sure is making him look like a moron. :)

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I'm sure he's a decent guy, but what he shows people here doesn't really give much support to him being too much of a thinker.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

So it's all people from the left making entries on conservopedia at a 5th grade writing level? They're just mercilessly going in and making the writers on that site sound like morons?

Can you cite this, please? I'd like to see some examples of the articles on this site that have been edited from their intellectual brilliance down to the level of a 5th grader.

If you can't, I'd like to see you be enough of a man to apologize for making up shit with no basis in fact.

[firni.livejournal.com]

He'd be great on RvL, don't you think?

[risu.livejournal.com]

Honestly, while vandalizing a wiki can be amusing (in the same way that graffiti can be pretty), it's not particularly admired on the left either.

That said, before harshing too much on it, one should remember just what kinds of things *well* intentioned people do on a wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:E_%28mathematical_constant%29/Archive_1

Scroll down to "special numbers"

[banner.livejournal.com]

I don't think everyone does it, just the radicals.

But as always they radicals make the loudest noise. However I do get tired of the 'everyone on the right is an inbreed moron' meme.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I don't know that I'd go as far as to say 'inbred.'

But on a more serious note, both the Republicans and Democrats have some pretty bad examples of people who fall into the radical side.

I'm not sure if you've noticed it, but you fit about the same extreme on the far right as the far left you constantly attack.

[risu.livejournal.com]

> However I do get tired of the 'everyone on the right is
> an inbreed moron' meme.

I think there's a perception on the left that the right wants to shield policy-makers from asking questions like:

"How can I find out if I'm genuinely doing the right thing?" and
"How can I test my beliefs as publicly as possible?" and
"What if I'm wrong?"

I think that there's a perception that the right wants to build its world on some of the hardest assumptions to test in all the world---things like the integrity of an unusually secretive President, the will of an intangible if omnipresent God, and the actual moral character of the residents of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

And a liberal is generally someone who thinks that an idea is only as good as the ability to test how good it is.

So I think it's pretty easy to see why stuff like Conservapedia would bring out that meme, and I think the meme itself is likely to stick around until the right embraces intellectual and spiritual and most importantly institutional skepticism and doubt.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

It breaks down like this to me, in the broadest of general terms:

Liberals question things and look for ways to do things better. That doesn't mean they won't make some things worse, but they aren't content to accept whatever people try to spoonfeed them.

Conservatives want people to blindly follow whatever they tell them. Questioning anything is frowned upon.

[risu.livejournal.com]

I think that you're overstating.

I think that what you're describing is a parasite on conservatism. It's conservatism gone out of control, and bears the same resemblance to conservatism that anarchy does to liberalism.

I think that it's fair to say that the Bush administration is actively encouraging what you describe, but not that it's inherent to the right.

The reason I say this is that in any political situation, there will be a conservative element, and there's none of us here who couldn't fall on that side someday if society shifts far enough left.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Like I said, it was in the broadest, most general sense.

I do agree with you for the most part. I think we're seeing Bush Conservatism and conservatism in general beginning to clash. The Republicans losing the Senate and House in last year's election is indicative of that.

What the conservatives need to do is re-establish themselves as something more than what the Bush Administration has helped make it.

In a sense, you could even draw a comparison between that and radical (violent) Islam/hardcore Christianity.

[banner.livejournal.com]

I don't mind the left questioning the right really. What I DO mind is the refusal of the left to be questioned themselves.

Perfect example: Murphy Brown. When Bush was President I -loved- that show, I loved seeing them lampoon and take on the issues of those in power. But when Clinton was elected the entire show turned into a love fest. They never took on anything those in power did anymore, they never lampooned him once.

I was greatly dissapointed and stopped watching the show halfway through the season.

I'm also greatly bothered by the number of physical assualts by people on the left against people on the right. The reverse is so rare as to hardly ever see it. How many speakers on the left get attacked at the podium or denied the ability to speak by people in the crowd? Yet people like Michell Malkin need a bodyguard. People like Al Franken try to pick fist fights with anyone who says anything he doesn't like (and folks -like- him?)

That bothers me a lot. I want to hear the debate, I do not want to see people getting beat up and maybe killed.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

oh ok, so when you said, ON THIS PAGE:

"Yup, gotta love the left, going and pretty much using organized tactics to deny the right their voice in any debate."

you were engaging in dishonest tactics? or are you doing that now? Or is it that you're incapable of holding a consistent position with regard to liberals, since it might get in the way of throwing regular slurs and insults at people who don't agree with your political opinions?

fascinating.

[foibos.livejournal.com]

However I do get tired of the 'everyone on the right is an inbreed moron' meme.

Then stop spreading it. It's people like you who make American right-wingers look bad.

(I use the qualifier "American" because to most of the rest of the world, American Democrats are right-wing nuts, and Republicans are simply off the scale.)

[foibos.livejournal.com]

Correction: s/bad/stupid/.

[loopback.livejournal.com]

I assume I can expect a post on your extremely Fair and Balanced livejournal about this incident where the crazy left silenced someone for speaking their mind about something controversial ...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17307316/

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I'm expecting one of a couple things:

* this is ignored
* it's spun back around to blame liberals more
* Bill Clinton is brought up somehow

[banner.livejournal.com]

this is ignored

Well it will be now.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I figured about as much.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

I see we also hit option #2.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

He did post about it, but he took a very, very predictable angle. Typical.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

Who's "denying the right their voice?" This is an open wiki, and if the owners of Conservapedia want to "invite all viewpoints" to the discussion, they're going to have to learn to deal with vandalism the same way that Wikipedia does. At which point, they'll be exactly like Wikipedia.

The posts on the Intelligent Design section of Conservapedia make my point: reality is biased toward evolutionary theory. There is no ID research program; there are no ID research papers. Over in anthropology there's a huge revolution going on now that a paper overturning the Clovis Theory has been presented, a virtual revolution in the anthropological emergence of humans in what we now call the American hemisphere. If the ID people had something that compelling, biologists would sit up and take note. They don't. So Conservapedia's evolution and intelligent design papers either correspond to reality-- in which case they look a lot like Wikipedia's-- or they don't, in which case they're ideological screeds that need to be walled off from exposure to reality to preserve their ideological purity.

The same is true of the histories of Jefferson and Washington. These men were not Christians in the sense that Conservapedia's backers would wish them to be and often claim them to be. "Historians" like Dave Barton have been caught claiming that quotes belonging to other men belonged to Jefferson and Washington or worse, making quotes up, and these go into the "record" of places like Conservapedia even though those quotes cannot be found in any of the thousands of letters and journals those two men left behind. The very Christian author Gregg Frazer has often chastised his own side for trying to make Jefferson and Washington into something they were not.

Conservapedia cannot have it all ways. If it really is an open project in which the best representation of reality rises to the top then, like Wikipedia, it will develop an immune system that can distinguish between scholarship, slop, and vandalism. If it is not, then it will establish an authoritarian editorial board that will dictate policy. Or it will continue to try and be both, and it will fail.

Accusations of censorship on the Internet is absurd: nothing shut you up, Banner. (There's something extraordinarily pathetic and dense about someone shouting "I'm being censored!" on a medium accessible by more than a billion people.) Nothing stops you from having your own soapbox. What matters is the quality of your speech, not the volume, not the quantity. What matters is how much it correlates to reality, and that you say it at all.

[banner.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that just because you can vandalize a site, it's okay? I thought the idea of wiki's was to allow debate and post both sides of the argument. You even said that other groups have targeted it to make it funny and mock the other side by re-writing their positions.

Also I never said "I'm being censored!" I just pointed out two sites in particular that I've been going to for a while where one group of people are actively seeking to deny the other end of the spectrum their voice by burying their comments and getting people banned. I further pointed out that now the other side was starting to adopt those tactics and the first group is starting to complain about it.

If Conservapedia is posting stuff that is incorrect as you claim, then pointing that out and showing sources is far more productive than by making it "a lovely target."

"Nothing stops you from having your own soapbox" Except DDOS attacks, hack attempts on my server, complaints to LJ about my posts, harrassing emails, and the occasional threat. (The last of which I'm still scratching my head over, how can you claim to be non-violent in one breath and then threaten someone in the next?) But I wasn't talking about individual private sites, I was talking about the sites opened to the general public, where you can have people banned simply by filing enough complaints and comments hidden by moderating them down. Yes it isn't easy to silence people these days, but it doesn't mean that they're not trying and resorting to very nasty tactics when they fail.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

DDOS attacks, hack attempts, complaints, harrassment and all that - yeah, it sucks. But next time, how about recognizing that it's coming from a very small fringe "group" of people and is in no way indicative of all liberals/Democrats.

I mean, I wouldn't look at how you act and apply that to all conservatives/Republicans.

[flashfire.livejournal.com]

Mmmhmm:

"Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American ... The administrators who monitor and control the content on Wikipedia do not represent the views of the majority of Americans, and many are in fact not American."

The first part is from their main page. The second is from their entry on Wikipedia.

Basically, "if you're not with us, you're against us." Bush has said the same thing regarding fighting terrorism. I do believe that is pretty much an evangelical Christian saying.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

As opposed to Wikipedia's "Justify your claims and cite your sources or shut the fuck up!" Which is to say, good encyclopedia editing.