Wicked wiki: What rock was I under when Conservapedia hit the news? How did I miss it on NPR, in the newspapers and on numerous weblogs? Oh yeah, I was completely out of pocket during the two weeks in March when it rose up out of nowhere and reared its butt-ugly head.
Conservapedia positions itself as an alternative to Wikipedia with its librul bias:
Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears? Our study suggests that Wikipedia is 6 times more liberal than the American public. Now it’s time for the Conservatives to get our voice out on the internet!
Conservapedia began in November 2006, as the class project for a World History class of 58 advanced homeschooled and college-bound students meeting in New Jersey.
Conservapedia has since grown enormously, including contributors worldwide. Conservapedia already exceeds the number of entries in the Oxford Dictionary of World History. Conservapedia is rapidly becoming one of the largest and most reliable online educational resources of its kind.
The “study” referred to above is a laundry list of examples of Wikipedia’s mistakes, inaccuracies and instances where entries would not pass the “Bill O’Reilly Test.” Here are a couple, starting with the number-one instance:
- Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia gives the credit due to Christianity and exposes the CE deception.
- About 60% of Americans accept the account of the Great Flood in the Bible. But enter “Great Flood” into Wikipedia and it automatically converts that to an entry entitled “Deluge (mythology).” That entry then uses “myth” or “mythology” nearly 70 times in its description. Its entry on “Noah’s Ark” is just as biased.
- Wikipedia’s entry on abortion reads like a brochure for the abortion industry. Wikipedia denies and omits the results of 16 out of 17 statistically significant studies showing increased risk of breast cancer from abortion. Wikipedia’s entry also omits the evidence of abortion causing increased premature birth of subsequent children. Instead of providing these facts, Wikipedia blames women by declaring that “breast cancer elicits disproportionate fear in women.”
OK, it’s easy to see where this is going. So how did they come up with that “statistic” that Wikipedia is six times more liberal? Creationistic math, that’s how:
Polls show that about twice as many Americans identify themselves as “conservative” compared with “liberal”, and that ratio has been increasing for two decades. But on Wikipedia, about three times as many editors identify themselves as “liberal” compared with “conservative”. That suggests Wikipedia is six times more liberal than the American public.
If you want to post on Conservapedia, you have to follow the rules. Only they’re called commandments. First commandment is, perhaps predictably, that you can’t post anything from Wikipedia or (as an afterthought) any other public domain sight. No vandalism or pornography. No wiki bots. No sock puppets. No fun.
So how unbiased is Conservapedia? Let’s look at their entry for Barak Obama:
Barack Obama is a half-African, half-Caucasian Democratic senator from Illinois, elected to the United States Senate in 2004 after serving as a state senator. His voting record places him as the tenth-most Liberal member of the U. S. Senate. His composite liberal rating was 86 percent, just seven points behind Ted Kennedy. Among fellow Senate Democrats, he was further left than liberals like John Kerry, Dianne Feinstein, Charles Schumer, Russ Feingold, Carl Levin, Joseph Biden and Harry Reid. Senator Obama is a Democratic front-runner for the 2008 United States presidential election. He has been criticized as being politically inexperienced, although he has retorted showing that some of the greatest presidents in American history were criticized for the same reason. He often speaks about his father’s African descent and has written The Audacity of Hope, a national bestseller, published in late 2006.
Personal Life
Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. His father was a Kenyan former farmer, and his mother a white US citizen from Kansas. His parents divorced when he was two, and Obama’s mother remarried to an Indonesian man and relocated the family to Jakarta, where Obama attended a Roman Catholic religious school. From age ten he lived in Hawaii with his maternal grandparents. He completed high school in 1979. Obama has a law degree from Harvard University and a BA from Columbia University. Until he entered politics in the 1990s, he was a senior lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
Hmm, no bias there, eh? His father was African and his mother was a white woman, but Obama ended up half Caucasian, a designation nobody uses anymore. The entry dwells rather a lot on Obama’s liberalness as a U.S. Senator and mentions that he was educated in a Roman Catholic, not just Catholic school.
Let’s look at how Wikipedia describes Obama:
Barack Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961; IPA pronunciation: [bəˈɹɑk oʊˈbÉ‘.mÉ™]), is the junior United States Senator from Illinois. According to the U.S. Senate Historical Office, he is the fifth African American Senator in U.S. history and the only African American currently serving in the U.S. Senate. He is a candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nomination.
He was elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996. Four years later, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. House of Representatives. Obama won reelection to the state senate in 2002, running unopposed. As early as 2002, he was a critic of the proposed Iraq War, declaring in a television interview that he would have voted against the Iraq Resolution. In 2004, he ran for an open seat in the U.S. Senate. Midway through the campaign, Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention and became a nationally known political figure. He was elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote.
Obama formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 presidential election in Springfield, Illinois, on February 10, 2007. Recent opinion polls rank him as the second most popular choice among Democratic voters for their party’s nomination, after Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY).
Well, it is pretty liberal. For instance, it doesn’t mention that Obama is the offspring of an African and a Caucasian white woman. In fact, it leaves out all of that extraneous smeary stuff Conservapedia includes. To me, it seems pretty straightforward, better written, better organized and more informative than Conservapedia. But then again, I am a progressive.
There are hundreds of thousands of examples on Conservapedia. To its credit, perhaps, the discussion area seems like a place where there’s real discussion going on, at least about the suitability of a black man to be U.S. president on the related Obama page. But that may be because weblogs are driving liberals to the site and they are bashing the wingnuts where they live.
So how popular is this site? Well, despite its claims to have 5.1 million page views, less than 22,000 visitors have clicked into the “about” page to find out who these people are. A visit to Alexa is very revealing. From October 2006 until mid-February 2007, the site was flat-lined with zero visitors.
Then the articles and mentions hit in the media and on the Web and visitors peaked in early March to about 2 percent of Web users. It has since tapered off and is rapidly trending down toward zero again.
Conservapedia a flash in the pan that hopefully will die out soon. It has a heavy creationism agenda, is rife with Christian dogma and is consistently poorly written. Like all conservative media products, it infuses language with politics, pushing an agenda by distorting meanings and manipulating context.
In a word, it’s a wicked wiki. Don’t go there.
Props to CalGal for the tip.
Sometimes you folks at PR just take my breath away. Such a good article. Amen and thanks.