| Subject: Query: The Sad Decline of P.J. O'Rourke |
| From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> |
| Date: 4/16/09, 11:15 |
| To: roger@harpers.org |
Conservatives have quite a few grievances against Wikipedia and the allegedly liberal influence that pervades the prominent online information source; the Bias in Wikipedia entry at Conservapedia, a website founded in 2007 to serve as the conservative alternative to its more mainstream counterpart, lists over a hundred and fifty such offenses.
Among other things, it is noted that Wikipedia promotes suicide with 21,544 entries that mention this depravity, which is to say that Wikipedia mentions suicide too often; that Wikipedia's article on atheism fails to mention that atheism is a causal factor for suicide, which is to say that Wikipedia does not mention suicide often enough; that Wikipedia is insufficiently respectful of Johnny Appleseed and that this ill-treatment is due to Appleseed having been a Christian minister; that Wikipedia administrators deleted the entry on Hollywood values which some helpful social conservative had gone to the trouble of writing and which listed examples of how the liberal ideology harms people; that Wikipedia is replete with Anglophilia, a charge not often leveled at American liberals; and that Wikipedia lies to exaggerate the credentials of atheist Richard Dawkins by claiming that Dawkins was the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. Wikipedia's campaign of deception on this last point has been so pervasive that even the administrators of Oxford University believe that they conferred this title on Dawkins.
Of course, Dawkins was indeed the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and Conservapedia's own entry on Dawkins now acknowledges this to be the case (although its Bias in Wikipedia page still accuses its editors of lying in service to liberalism for stating the very same thing). The process by which this simple fact finally made its way into the Dawkins article is recorded in full on the associated talk page, a feature of wiki entries wherein contributors discuss changes to be made to a particular article. On Wikipedia, such talk pages are often very interesting, particularly when the subject in question is controversial. On Conservapedia, they are often surreal, even if the subject in question is not particularly controversial at all.
The written debate over whether or not Oxford is better qualified than Conservapedia to decide who is and isn't a professor at Oxford took over a year and involved tens of thousands of words. This is more time and energy than usually goes into such wiki-arguments. In this case, though, the chief proponent of Conservapedia's authority over Oxford was Andrew Schlafly, founder of Conservapedia, son of conservative icon Phyliss Schlafly, and one-man metaphor for what ails the modern conservative movement. On the other side of the debate were several other Conservapedia contributors who argued in vain that Oxford itself had already made clear that Dawkins had held the professorship in question since 1996.
At some point, a contributor actually filed a U.K. Freedom of Information Act request in order to obtain clarification from Oxford; a university representative replied that the title of Professor was properly conferred on Dr Dawkins and addressed several other points that had been brought up in the course of the argument. But Schlafly was unconvinced, oddly claiming that the answers received were simply too general to be helpful, and at any rate still disagreed that the professorship conferred upon Dawkins was a real professorship. The argument went on well past the point at which Dawkins finally resigned from the position in 2008; by the time things had finally wound down, a new debate had arisen over whether or not it was appropriate for a Conservapedian administrator to have added a picture of Adolf Hitler to the top of the Dawkins article, with several other contributors taking the position that it might make more sense to put up a picture on Dawkins instead. A compromise was eventually reached whereby the Hitler picture was placed a bit lower down on the page.
Most of the conflicts that arise on Conservapedia's talk pages follow a similar pattern: one or more of the site's reasonable, economically conservative contributors attempts to add some important fact or remove a dubious assertion, only to run into opposition from the site administrators, who themselves tend to be social conservatives. Because final authority lies within the latter group, Conservapedia has not developed into much of an encyclopedia in the usual sense, but then the world really didn't need another such thing anyway; rather, it serves as a convenient window into the ongoing civil war within the conservative movement as a whole, the one being fought between the intellectually honest Burkeans and the intellectually degenerate Palinstinians.
Over at the talk page for Conservapedia's article on the pen-and-paper role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, for instance, several armchair demonologists are disappointed with the article's shockingly neutral point of view regarding D&D in general and the game's positive depiction of magic in particular. Another contributor defends the hobby, countering that the game does not actually promote such things as witchcraft, but the fundamentalists aren't buying. I'm sorry, but I've heard too many accounts of demonic attacks stemming from Dungeons and Dragons to take claims of it being innocent seriously, writes one, uh, skeptical contributor.
Indeed, Satan's strategies of deceit are often an item of contention. On the talk page for Genesis, we find a theological dispute regarding whether or not the serpent depicted therein is actually Satan or simply a talking snake. An administrator is firmly convinced that the snake is, indeed, Satan, noting that snakes don't talk to people and convince them to grab some fruit, much less cause people do [sic] disobey God. A contributor arguing otherwise retorts that serpents walked on four legs before God cursed them. The notion that they no longer talk is irrelevant. It's a good point, but the logic seems lost on the administrator, who merely repeats his earlier assertion that Snakes don't talk people into disobeying God. Satan does. His opponent tries to explain that he'd just established that snakes were different in those days, but this only makes the administrator angrier. If you intend to continue this fight, then I'm going to boot you from the site, he responds.
Many such arguments at Conservapedia end with similar threats. During the Dawkins debate, Schlafly himself warned several contributors that they would be banned unless they refrained from arguing with him further. Elsewhere, on a special debate page entitled Why haven't intelligent design creationists published a single scientific article?, Schlafly took issue with a contributor's assertion that the leaders of the intelligent design movement had thus far failed to spell out their theory in a peer-reviewed journal, explaining that evolutionists are censors and do everything they can to suppress other viewpoints and research and then adding, without irony, that your account will be blocked if you persist in posting falsehoods here. He can probably be excused for his outburst; Schafly is a sensitive fellow, and evolution is a sensitive topic for fellows such as he. Above all, Conservapedia is supposed to be something of an online haven for the anti-evolution crowd, a place where decorum precludes mentioning that advocates of intelligent design haven't added any new articles to their own scientific journal since 2005.
In further defense of Schafly, he's usually rather polite. On the talk page for Professor Values, an encyclopedic article on the general perfidy of the nation's academic elite, a contributor writes, What statistical evidence is there in this article of atheism, plagiarism, socialism, censorship etc. [sic] This article makes unfounded claims.
Schafly is accommodating. Help find the support for those observations. It's not difficult to find. Thanks and Godspeed.