It Takes All Kinds

In his Wikipedia too liberal for you? post, Walt Crawford introduced me to Conservapedia– a fascinating Christian and American alternative to Wikipedia. Wow, is really my only reaction. Crawford pointed out that Wikipedia is deemed biased because of the use of BCE and CE rather than BC and AD and because of the use of non-American-English spelling variants. From Conservapedia:

Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English speaking users are American. Look up “Most Favored Nation” on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling “Most Favoured Nation”, even there there are far more American than British users. Look up “Division of labor” on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling “Division of labour,” then insists on the British spelling for “specialization” also.^[3]. Enter “Hapsburg” (the European ruling family) and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been “Hapsburg”. Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

Most English speaking users are American, huh? I was unaware of this fact previously. Good to know.

My next favorite reason for Wikipedia’s bias is that

Gossip is pervasive on Wikipedia. Many entries read like the National Enquirer. For example, Wikipedia’s entry on Nina Totenberg states, “She married H. David Reines, a trauma physician, in 2000. On their honeymoon, he treated her for severe injuries after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming.” That sounds just like the National Enquirer, and reflects a bias towards gossip. Conservapedia avoids gossip and vulgarity, just as a true encyclopedia does.

I will have to add that Conservapedia does seem to avoid vulgarity. Those who agreed with the librarians and parents who wanted to ban the Newbery award winning book, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron, will be happy to know that as of today, the word scrotum does not grace the pages of Conservapedia! Your children should be safe here. This may also be the place to go if you are trying to get away from news of Anna Nicole Smith’s death or Britney Spears’s newly bald head and flight from rehab.

And just in case you didn’t realize this, “In breton “wiki” means liberal, and “pedia” means bias. The founders of wikipedia were celtic.” This is the last of the reasons for Wikipedia’s biases. Seems to me the founders shouldn’t have needed the 27 other reasons.

Be sure to check out the Consverapedia Commandments. 

Walt Crawford did mention that one may experience trouble accessing the site – and I have experienced this. The site does seem to be getting more traffic than it can handle.