The few funny entries which remain have been flagged as lacking in some way. Even the brilliant entry on soup which reads:

A food created by boiling one or more ingredients in water, stock or broth. Unless it’s gazpacho.

It has also increased to a massive 7,000 articles. Only another 1,722,000 to go and it will catch up with Wikipedia!

There is a more significant consequence of all this than just removing a source of ridicule for us liberals (as we would be called by them) and that is that there must be an increased chance of the whole thing being taken seriously.

The first impossible to argue with statement is:

Dan Brown is responsible for feeding millions of readers a pack of lies cleverly wrapped up as a historically accurate novel.

And the second is:

If nothing else, The Da Vinci Code teaches a lesson on how susceptible people are to believing an attractively-packaged lie, and how vitally important it is that the truth is broadcasted earnestly by those who know it.

Which, ironically, in their own semi-literate way is really stating the case for those of us who deeply distrust the religious fundamentalists of all flavours.

With no power comes no responsibility

I think you can make that mean all sorts of things which Kevin Smith never intended. Just like the old saying goes that if you have great power you have a great responsibility to use it wisely, is it the case that when you remove the last bit of power from someone they will feel no responsibility at all?

All the greatest civil disturbances happened when a large group of society felt that they had no control over their own situation; no power at all, and therefore felt no need at all to act responsibly or even to worry about repercussions. When you gradually erode citizens’ power do you simultaneously encourage them to be correspondingly less responsible?

I dunno. Bloody good film though. Lets not let sociological musings get in the way of enjoyment of Kevin Smith’s latest potty-mouthed parade of knob-gags! Maybe not everybody’s cup of tea, but for anyone who has followed Kevin Smith’s films its more of the same and picks up nicely on some of the jokes from the original Clerks. Guest appearances from Ben Affleck, Jason Lee, and Kevin Smith’s Mrs. will come as no surprise at all…

I still have a whole disc full of extras to get through, but a couple of the deleted scenes on the first disc cracked me up. Some great digs at the Lord of the Rings trilogy and how the whole trilogy is just about walking (“Even the fucking trees walked in that movie!”) although it has to be said that funny as Randal’s impression of LOTR was, Kevin Smith did it miles better on his 2nd Audience With… DVD

All that and donkey sex too (“we don’t call it bestiality – its inter-species erotica”). For some reason Conservapedia seems to be lacking in articles about Kevin Smith or any of his films…

I didn’t even need computer assistance to do the word count. (21 words)

Today I stumbled across an entry on Plato which has obviously been vandalised, from the point of view of the site owners, but looking at the history it could be classed as an improvement. So, the Conservapedia entry on Plato – one of the most important philosophers ever (even though all the ideas in his books seem to belong to Socrates, but never mind) reads as follows:

Plato was a great Greek philosopher from 428 to 347 BC, after which he was not so great. He was a student of Socrates and founded the Academy, a school bereft of buildings wherein Plato taught his students while wanking. He wrote the Republic, and its logical sequel, The Laws, as well as a large number of other, less popular works in which he showed (amongst other things) how to teach geometry to slaves, how to irritate sophists, and how everything in the world is made of triangles. One of Plato’s pupils was Aristotle.

Wonderful though the Internet is, I am so glad I got myself an education before it came along…

In a masterstroke of brevity the whole topic, which Wikipedia takes nearly 7000 words to describe in some depth has been reduced to this:

A blitzkrieg is a quick surprise attack by massive ground and air forces, usually by the German military. “Blitzkrieg” is from the German words for lighting (“blitz”) and war (“krieg”). This term was first coined by the New York Times

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the whole business is that it is all wrapped up with home study. Apparently home study is a big deal in the USA amongst conservative circles: it means they can bring up their children to think exactly like them, with no danger of independent thought or new ideas being introduced to them at school. As Danivon said at a meeting tonight, the Conservapedia is not a very good advertisement for home study!

Which brings me to today’s example of madness and badness. I hit the random article link just now and got a tiny entry on geocentric theory which said it was proposed by Ptolemy. That was about all it said, and that is wrong – the idea of the Earth being at the centre of everything was around for centuries before Ptolemy’s time. But there was a link to an entry on Ptolemy, so I followed that and found something glorious.

The article on Ptolemy was a veritable essay by Conservapedia standards. With 3 paragraphs containing 785 characters in 135 words (I pasted it into OpenOffice and did a word count – I didn’t sit here counting them by hand) it is bigger than their entry on Adolf Hitler!

Having pasted the text into OpenOffice I didn’t dare run a spelling or grammar checker on it in case the computer started acting like one of those computers in Star Trek which has been asked to explain a paradox. Here is the third paragraph:

But, although throughout the many years this idea was embraced several scientists tried proving this theory wrong, people refusehighly respected, no one doubted him. Also, people liked the fact that Ptolemy d to listen. Because Ptolemy was placed the Earth in the center of the universe, making it the most important.

It reads like one of those instructions for tourists in an oriental hotel, which was translated from one language to another by someone who is fluent in neither.

Having protected their children from the pernicious liberal attitudes of society, these cranks are giving them an education where such absolute garbage is being used to explain stuff to them. I hope the Eagle Forum have their own exams too because anyone educated via such rubbish isn’t going to stand a chance in a proper exam where any sort of linguistic coherence is needed.

Conservapedia says that it exists because Wikipedia is “biased” and “anti-Christian and anti-American”. On the main page it says:

You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of “political correctness”

By which it really means that you will much prefer using it if you want very limited information about a very limited number of topics, and prefer it to be overtly biased towards Christianity and America where ever possible.

I am not sure I really want to criticise it too much because its just too easy – its like shooting fish in a barrel – and no challenge at all. But on the other hand, its hard to resist. I know that Wikipedia, by its very nature, is something you have to be a bit wary with, but it is a brilliant starting point for research. I can’t see anyone being able to use Conservapedia for anything serious.

For a start, the Conservapedia boasts that there are “over 3800″ entries in it. They will pardon me for being underwhelmed, when Wikipedia has more than 358,000 entries just in the Polish language: in English it has over 1.6 million entries. So criticism number one has to be:

The scope is very narrow

Even if you are happy with the bias, if you are trying to get information for a school project you had better hope it is one of the 3800 entries or you are stuffed. The exception might be if you were in a school with a very limited and curriculum and one where independent thinking is actively discouraged. The sort of place where intelligent design would be considered a dangerously liberal concept. Fortunately few of us go, or went, to such a place.

Obviously to list all the omissions would be impossible – it would be a list with 1.6 million items on it. Just a quick look revealed that there is no entry for Ismail Kadare (Author of 31 books, winner of the first Booker International prize, and probably the most important Albanian writer). You can’t put that down purely to an anti-foreigner bias though: there are no articles for Thomas Pynchon or John Updike. There are no entries for such seemingly common things as “iPod” or “BBC” either.

Pull up one of the very few entries in this travesty of an encyclopedia and you are likely to find something astonishingly devoid of details, so my second criticism would be:

The depth of information is very limited

And that is a huge understatement! For example, call up the article on Adolf Hitler, one of the most important historical figures of the 20th century, responsible for events which shaped the current world, and you get three paragraphs. Three short paragraphs at that. By contrast, the Wikipedia article on Hitler is huge. It is split into 15 sections, which you have to scroll down 21 times to get to the end of.

At the end there are references/citations for the assertions in the article and links to other sources of information, as well as the entry itself being littered with links to other Wikipedia entries. Nothing unusual in that: it is how the Internet works, and especially Web 2.0 applications like wikis. That is why it is called a web after all. But that brings me to the third criticism:

Its not a real wiki

Sticking with the example of the entry on Hitler, there are no links at all. It mentions Germany but no link to an entry on that even. Which is probably just as well. The entry on Germany consists of a single line, which is

A country in central Europe that was blamed for both Wolrd Wars and claimed to be the dominate race of mankind.

Not exactly comprehensive is it? (I cut and pasted, so the poor spelling/grammar is all theirs)

Apart from the lack of links, there are no citations at all and no links to other sources of information. I can understand the lack of external links: the tinfoil hat-wearing God-botherers responsible no doubt assume that the entire rest of the Internet is biased, unchristian and unamerican, and by their standards they are probably right, but the lack of citations is worrying. At least in Wikipedia if you see something questionable there is often a reference so that it is attributable.

Another example displaying the lack of depth and lack of wiki features is the entry on Ayatollah. On Wikipedia you get a pretty full page stuffed with links including a link to a list of Ayatollahs and a sidebar listing links to many other topics relating to Islamic jurisprudence. Conservapedia has a single paragraph:

The ayatollah is the religious title for an Islamic leader in Iran. For 25 years they opposed the Shah. In 1978 they succeeded in overthrowing the Shah of Iran. In 1979, when the U.S.A. admitted the Shah for medical treatment, the ayatollahs led an attack on the U.S. embassy, causing the Iran Hostage Crisis.

That tells you nothing about what an Ayatollah is, just what some of them have done. And it is wrong when it says it only an Iranian title, as there are Iraqi Ayatollahs too.

So far I have stuck to reasonably uncontentious topics – in the weird world of the right-wing religious maniacs of America even Adolf Hitler is relatively uncontentious – and avoided topics relating to christianity, philosophy or metaphysics, and that is when it starts to get scary/hilarious and reveals the main criticism which is:

The site is intentionally biased

That is a criticism which might be expected to be number one, but since the site makes no secret of this it is partly mitigated. At least it is not pretending to be neutral. I hope. Self-confessed bias is a bit better than concealed bias. It is still biased though.

But how about the claims that Wikipedia is biased? I am sure it is. All the people involved in Wikipedia say they want it to have a neutral point of view, but even if they all mean it there still has to be a built-in unconscious bais which reflects the ingrained collective cultural bias of the authors. That is unavoidable and not necessarily a bad thing as what bias there is reflects the general attitudes of most of society. If there is a problem it is that the Conservapedia bunch are out of tune with society, so they are fighting a doomed uphill rearguard battle trying to counteract it.

There is enough suspicion of this sort of person to make it unilkely they would succeed even with a useful site, but with a site which cannot be of any practical use to anyone there is no chance whatsoever. If I found their entries to be more complete and more comprehensive than Wikipedia I would use it, regardless of provenance, but its like they don’t even realise how crappy it is.

Can you imagine preparing to go on a business trip to Germany and deciding to find out a bit about the place before setting of and all you can find is that it is “a country in central Europe that was blamed for both Wolrd Wars and claimed to be the dominate race of mankind.” Mind you, the entry on the USA is not much better: three paragraphs, including this gem:

The USA is rightly considered by its patriotic citizens to be the best country in the world. Previously such beliefs (also known as Manifest destiny) were held by citizens of former superpowers, such as the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union and the Third Reich).

Note the word “rightly” in there, it really is the cherry on the cake. It gets better though. Not only is it stated as fact that America is the best country in the world, but elsewhere it says that Christianity is the only religion based on faith. In the entry on faith it says:

No other religion is based on faith as distinguished from mere belief.

and

But faith preached uniquely by Jesus obviously refers to something far more precise than any “a system of religious beliefs,” and such faith has never been preached in the same way by non-Christian religions

and

Jesus was unique in preaching the significance of faith and it is exclusive to Christianity

Hmm.. but even this brief entry says that faith is mentioned 229 times in the new testament, only twice in the old testament and in the Koran “the concept of faith in Allah is mentioned only once.” But it is mentioned. So if the Koran mentions it at all, how can it be exclusive to christianity?

And lets not even get into whether its down to how the two books have been translated into English – because its a fair bet that nobody associated with Conservapedia has read either in the original languages.

I could spend all night digging into this pile of crap and finding entries which are amusing, ridiculous, inadequate, missing, or just plain wrong, but I do have to sleep. Anyone who wants more examples of unintentional hilarity will have to go look themselves…