Gunboat Diplomat
New Member
I was just browsing through Conservapedia and let me tell you that it has been an interesting and surreal experience! I wasn't sure which forum to post this but I finally decided to post it here 'cause it vaguely concerns what the contributors of this encyclopedia believe...
The first thing you'll notice about Conservapedia is the obvious Christian and particularly Young Earth Creationism bias in it. Despite this, it's actually very respectful of all Christian denomenations and even other religions as well! Of course, it has a very tainted and critical view of atheism. Similar to Fox News, their bias is considered a form of "trustworthiness."
What interested me the most are its scientific pages. Many topics of science are not controversial and consequently I perceived no bias in their description. Of course, there are many scientific endeavors that are controversial and those pages are as bad as you'd expect. However, there were two things that surprised me about these pages.
First, I was surprised by which topics of science were controversial. Quantum mechanics was untouched but relativity was slandered badly. I do not understand the offense they take to relativity. There's obviously some motive here but I can't see what that is. Even things like plate tectonics and continental drift were uncontroversial to them, albeit interpreted as the result of the biblical flood...
This leads me to be second point: there is clearly a lot of effort at Conservapedia to avoid looking too foolish. This can be seen when you sift through the history and talk pages of subjects that you think ought to have been controversial for them. Many attempts were made to include moral relativism in the page on Einsteinian relativity but these efforts were defeated by other creationists! Similarly on the thermodynamics page, many attempts to add the claim that the second law proves evolution wrong were removed by fellow creationists who actually know a little physics.
There is concerted effort put into appearance by Conservapedia. There was debate about how much to reveal on Kent Hovind because of their conflicting motives of being informative, not attacking a brother of Christ and distancing themselves from a convicted criminal. They've also taken great care to create original work and not just copy from external sources. This is evidenced by how paltry and colloquial their entries are. When you compare pages between Conservapedia and Wikipedia. you can see a marked difference in quality and the amount of content. One just overshadows the other in utility, so much so that you know that no copying of content is happening!
This was an interesting and masochistic experience for me, overall!
The first thing you'll notice about Conservapedia is the obvious Christian and particularly Young Earth Creationism bias in it. Despite this, it's actually very respectful of all Christian denomenations and even other religions as well! Of course, it has a very tainted and critical view of atheism. Similar to Fox News, their bias is considered a form of "trustworthiness."
What interested me the most are its scientific pages. Many topics of science are not controversial and consequently I perceived no bias in their description. Of course, there are many scientific endeavors that are controversial and those pages are as bad as you'd expect. However, there were two things that surprised me about these pages.
First, I was surprised by which topics of science were controversial. Quantum mechanics was untouched but relativity was slandered badly. I do not understand the offense they take to relativity. There's obviously some motive here but I can't see what that is. Even things like plate tectonics and continental drift were uncontroversial to them, albeit interpreted as the result of the biblical flood...
This leads me to be second point: there is clearly a lot of effort at Conservapedia to avoid looking too foolish. This can be seen when you sift through the history and talk pages of subjects that you think ought to have been controversial for them. Many attempts were made to include moral relativism in the page on Einsteinian relativity but these efforts were defeated by other creationists! Similarly on the thermodynamics page, many attempts to add the claim that the second law proves evolution wrong were removed by fellow creationists who actually know a little physics.
There is concerted effort put into appearance by Conservapedia. There was debate about how much to reveal on Kent Hovind because of their conflicting motives of being informative, not attacking a brother of Christ and distancing themselves from a convicted criminal. They've also taken great care to create original work and not just copy from external sources. This is evidenced by how paltry and colloquial their entries are. When you compare pages between Conservapedia and Wikipedia. you can see a marked difference in quality and the amount of content. One just overshadows the other in utility, so much so that you know that no copying of content is happening!
This was an interesting and masochistic experience for me, overall!
