Discovered today that
Conservapedia's gone ban-crazy lately: entire subnets, ISPs and countries, as well as any user who doesn't use their real name. Over 500 blocks in the past month, 742 in the month of June.
I could go on, but instead you should read
this article by Philip J. Rayment, a Conservapedia admin who resigned in March of this year out of disgust over what Conservapedia had become. Some choice quotes:
Unlike many at RationalWiki and elsewhere who would like to see Conservapedia fail at its goal, like some others I wanted it to succeed at what it ostensibly is—a good, accurate, family-friendly encyclopaedia suitable for students written from a "conservative" or Christian point of view. Unfortunately, I simply cannot see that happening, and my opinions have changed.
Almost three years since it began, most of Conservapedia's actual articles are still stubs. The longest articles are partially or wholly pieces of propaganda: even a relatively apolitical article like "deacon" has a section on why the Catholic church hierarchy is that of the pagan Roman church. Meanwhile, its front page has received as many hits in total as Wikipedia's front page does in a day.
Nobody seems to want to actually write encyclopedia articles. Certainly not among the leaders. Instead they seem to spend all their time having debates or attacking biologists or writing pseudo-articles like 'Liberal bias' or 'Hollywood Values'.
Articles created by Conservapedia founder Andy Schlafly's include several neologisms which he appears to have invented himself, seemingly to explain why he's always right and everyone else is a deceitful liberal: "Conservapedia's Law" (that the number of new conservative words invented doubles every century, proving conservatism superior), "emotional gambling", "evolution syndrome", "professor values", and "last wordism".
Similar articles, all started by Schlafly, about why anyone who doesn't agree with him is wrong: "liberal deceit" (why people who don't agree with me tend to be liars), "liberal myths" (claiming a population explosion is a trick to promote abortion), "liberal obfuscation", "liberal redefinition", "liberal tools" (hint: #1 is deceit), "liberal tricks", "liberals and friendship" (liberals will only be your friend if you accept liberal values), "liberal falsehoods", "liberal intellectualism", "liberal logic" (nonsensical logic), and "liberal supremacist". There's also a fantastic article called "Mystery: Why Do Non-Conservatives Exist?"
One of the more senior administrators, DanH, resigned in protest over the Barack Obama article. Another administrator had told me in an e-mail that he was also dissatisfied and was considering resigning in protest. I wondered if I should too, but also realised that such an act of protest was not seen by Andy or other administrators as cause to reconsider.
This refers to the article titled "Barack Hussein Obama", which includes a twenty-three point essay on why Obama is likely to be a Muslim.
Another user and I both produced evidence in the form of various authorities saying that the translation was changed. Andy, however, continued to insist that the claims that the translation was changed were false claims made by evolutionists. When he was challenged to produce evidence, he merely said that he'd spent too much time on the issue and that we should all move on.
