Conservapedia, and the Internet

Conservapedia is billed as a conservative, "clean and concise" alternative to Wikipedia ( I'm not giving them a link).

Wikipedia, they object, is chock-full of anti-Christian entries. Wikipedia uses date citations with "CE" instead of "AD", obviously denying Christ. British spellings are tolerated instead of good American, obviously indicating - hey - surely something sinister.

This post, by Jon Swift, describes it:

For years homeschooled children have had to rely for all of their information on Wikipedia, which is full of dangerous ideas that homeschooling was supposed to prevent from seeping into the home. Now, finally, there is an alternative, which doesn't have any controversial ideas at all: Conservapedia. Conservapedia is based on good Christian values, unlike Wikipedia, which I gather from the name, is based on Wiccan.

One article he cites:

Kangaroo: Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin* that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood.

When Conservapedia started out, these enthusiasts all made themselves look like risible idiots.

Then various authors at ScienceBlogs got ahold of it, linking to the most egregiously ill-informed and downright stupid entries for the readers' amusement. Some went so far as to post their own Onion-esque parody entries.

In a day, the Medieval clockwork server at Conservapedia was overwhelmed, and down for most of the time. Comment threads, especially at Pharyangula, tried to pick apart what was really religious conservative nonsense from the parody posts.

Lately, new contributors have been suspended, presumably while the site's overseers try, vainly, to pick out the crap from the parody of the same crap.

ScinceBlogs links.





*Baramin is a made-up pseudo-Hebrew word that that is intended to stand in place of the "kinds" of the Genesis story. See, the Noahic flood story has a problem with every jot-and-tittle species fitting into the Ark. So the creationists have invented these categorical precursors, that then radiated about the globe and changed within narrow morphological pathways. Since they remain the same "kinds," then there's no evolution. Except they never say "morphological," and they're full of shit. And you can't try to explain this stuff without getting stupid yourself.