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Conservapedia – The trusted encyclopedia
This site was a joint winner of an Encouragement Award in the 2009 Millenium Awards. The award citation read:
There is not enough humour in the world of irrational and uncritical thinking these days, so it was exceptionally pleasing to see not one but two sites which promise hours of fun. Both Conservapedia and CreationWiki are based on the wiki platform, thus ensuring enormous amusement as competing anonymous parties make changes, undo the changes, make the changes again, undo again and so on. The two sites should be encouraged to continue building their respective stores of nonsense and pseudoscience so that the world's supply of laughter can be continually replenished.
A new reference source (24/3/2007)
Andy Schlafly is the son of Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle Forum whose web site holds the current record for the number of categories in which it is listed in The Millenium Project, but it is not fair to judge a person by the actions of his parents. Andy Schlafly is a lawyer, a trade which usually indicates a more-than-passing familiarity with the use and nuances of language, but he is one of the people who have accused me of not knowing how to spell "millennium". When it was pointed out to him by several people (none of them me) that a clear explanation of the etymology of the word "millenium" as used on this site was and is displayed on the front page of the site he carefully considered the situation and then said that he understood but that I still didn't know how to spell "millennium". While an intellect like that serves a useful purpose by ensuring that the left-hand half of the graph of intelligence distribution doesn't distort the overall bell shape of the curve, it is unfair to judge a person harshly just because they don't seem smart enough to know how (or why) to tie shoelaces.
Mr Schlafly has now made a grab for great fame by starting a web site named Conservapedia. This has been established to counter the extreme left-liberal, evolutionist and atheist bias in Wikipedia which apparently prevents the truth from appearing there. I have my own critical opinion of the value of Wikipedia, but I have to say that I haven't seen any real evidence of Jimmy Wales being a reincarnation of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin or of the anonymous writers, editors and arbitrators being members of The Great Left Wing Conspiracy. (A comment from an anonymous person: McDonalds is where you go when you are hungry but don't care about the quality of the food you get. Wikipedia is where you go when you are curious but don't care about the quality of the information you get. But I digress …)
I like to see a diversity of opinions, and Conservapedia goes beyond that to present a diversity of facts. I wish the site well and I hope that it will evolve (if I can use that word) into a useful repository of crackpottery and misinformation. An example of the high quality of information in this encyclopaedia can be found in the definition of "Beef". Here it is in its entirety at the time of writing:
Beef is the meat of cows. Hindus do not eat beef. Vegetarians also do not eat beef.
Conservapedia gets even better! (14/8/2010)
In the 2009 Millenium Awards the Conservapedia site received an encouragement award. I am pleased to see that its founder, illiterate lawyer Andy Schlafly, has actually been encouraged to improve the information available from the site. The buzz this week has been about the Conservapedia entry Named "Counterexamples to Relativity". It seems that relativity as espoused by Einstein (and corroborated by every scientist who has ever devised an experiment that tested the theory) is not really true. Here are the reasons given to explain why one of the most productive scientific theories in physics of the 20th century is not reliable.
The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world. Here is a list of 28 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.
I will leave it up to people who know more about physics than I do (a set which I sometimes feel includes Cody The Religion Hating Dog) to provide scientific responses, but the very idea that a scientific theory can be rejected because it supports one side of politics over another is ludicrous. Does the name Trofim Lysenko ring any bells?
Still, I suppose the Conservapedia objection to relativity isn't as silly as one I once saw drawn from "feminist science". In that universe the equation E=mc2 had to be rejected because of its patriarchal origin, placing as it does the speed of light in a superior position over all other physical constants and thereby signifying the oppression of women and condoning rape where the man is always on top of the woman. Or some such bullshit.
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