1st
March
2007
Laugh up your sleeve
posted by saurabh in Fascists, Galloping idiocy, Levity |Just a heads-up. I assume by now that all of you have heard of and perused Conservapedia, the product of a group of uneducated troglodytes home-schooled conservative students which attempts to counter the pervasive liberal bias evident in Wikipedia (cf. Colbert’s observation that this bias may be attributed directly to reality). It’s only good for a chortle at the moment, since they seem to have locked out account creation and anonymous page edits. But you might check out their page of Debate topics, or the star in their crown, the Theory of Evolution (link fixed).
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I searched for “fossil record.” I could find no record of a fossil record.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Did_Jefferson_Copy_the_Declaration_of_Independence%3F. I’m not sure “having similar ideas because you both read Locke and Rousseau” is the same as “plagiarism”.
This page scares me, because I don’t think there is a balance of ideas anymore. You can only have a real debate about ideas and values when the sides are evenly matched and there’s a point-counterpoint where both sides can finally reach an accord (or at least respectfully agree to disagree). When someone wants to “debate” the question of “Who wrote the Declaration of Independence”, and they can’t even get their facts straight there, then we have a lopsided situation where one side is clearly dominant and the other side’s argument is “I’m right because I don’t wanna be wrong, so there!”
I don’t even want to look at the “evolution” pages. People will be picking tiny, bloody pieces of my exploded head off my monitor for months.
Sister: Good thing you don’t want to look at the evolution page, because it’s gone.
My intact head thanks you.
Oops, it’s there, even if the link above was bad. Try this. I’ll tell your housecleaner to wear gloves when picking up skull fragments.
Happy anniversary.
I’m getting a lot of 500 errors. . .are we entirely sure this isn’t a joke?
If it is, it’s pretty funny.
Their debate on evolution features some sensible person taking the side of sanity, so my head stayed intact.
The page that messed up the shape of my noggin was the one on bias in wikipedia, which actually lists mostly bias in conservapedia and uses the term “refuses” a lot, as in, “wikipedia refuses to follow the bias that we follow here.”
I’ll be surprised if it builds enough content to be useful to anyone.
They also rail against inaccuracy. I picked one thing to compare on: Conserva’s ‘Fahrenheit’ entry is incorrect in it’s speculation (speculation is against their “commandments”) about why the human body temp is such a strange number (98.6 for most of you) given Fahrenheit’s intent to base the scale on it. At least Wikipedia itself mentions many speculative theories, and ends with the true one–that the scale was recalibrated a little after his death.
hmm. so if there’s going to be an anti-encyclopedia, and an anti-anti-encyclopedia, then the continuing pressure to finish the job for once and all will result in, ta-da,
the contradictopedia.
or maybe the aucontrairopedia.
individual entries, from many points of view, will be accepted. everything that anybody believes will have equal weight. no facts will be checked. points and counterpoints are allowed. entries may be edited by the authors only until a quorum of entries is reached, which is determined by randomly selected observers. at which point, if the entries are approximately equal in length, the entry is locked and the real entry is generated by shuffling the words in all submitted entries together, and dealing them out in readable syntax. that then would be the truth.
Ummm… I think you just described the internet.
no no. the internet is terrible model for organizing information. people put up any crap they want. this would be like binding arbitration. present your best case and the machine will combine it at the word level with other people’s arguments and then you have to live with its produced finding of fact.
this comment is wearing a ribbon whose ends have been cut to make eight legs. save the octopus!
oh ho ho ho. the octopus went away. fortunately i saw that coming and stored the octopus article for posterity just before linking to it. what should i do with it? okay bye.