American is a language & other thoughts from Conservapedia

[Kishiria]

The "Conservative Bible" is one thing that makes me wonder if this is a massive piece of performance art. I think for many of the contributors it is, but Andy Schlafly really is that batshit insane.

[gardenvarietycitizen]

It is an even better example of an unreliable source than The Original Wikipedia though.

Speaking of which... my husband taught a class on American History to university students this past semester. This class is a special "writing emphasis" class, so it gets a lot of first year students who are learning to write academic papers for the first time.

A lot of the students coming in don't realize the need to cite sources or what it means. A good number of them don't know the usual rule that you can't cite an encyclopedia (of any kind, online or not - you use the encyclopedia to point you to the sources IT used, which should be listed at the end of the article if it's a decent encyclopedia - even Wikipedia has them).

So on the first paper, quite a few students didn't read the instructions, and cited Wikipedia. This happens, hands are slapped, people learn. The second papers are generally a LOT better already.

But one guy actually cited Conservapedia. That just boggled the mind. That guy got a special lecture about don't cite the encyclopedia, and particularly don't cite political sites that are known to be prone to massive trolling... (to be fair, that sometimes happens on Wikipedia too, depending on the topic.)

I remember when Conservapedia first went live (before it had a chance to acquire troll content, so it was "true" in a sense). I looked up "kangaroo" and compared with the Wikipedia entry, the results were fascinating. Conservapedia really did feel like a sincere but not so well educated creationist high school student's earnest best effort.

I learned a lot about "baramin" from that, though - by seeing it mentioned in Conservapedia and then looking THAT up in Wikipedia...

[gardenvarietycitizen]

The "Conservative Bible" is one thing that makes me wonder if this is a massive piece of performance art. I think for many of the contributors it is, but Andy Schlafly really is that batshit insane.

Hell yeah.

You want some good hilarious reading? Surf on over to the Rational Wiki and read about "The Lenski Affair," where Andrew Schlafly tries taking on biologist Richard Lenski at Michigan State University over evolution (specifically evolution that has actually been observed in Lenski's lab).

Basically, Lenski utterly PWNS him. The correspondence involved is just hilarious. Rational Wiki reproduces it for your reading pleasure...

[Avalondaughter]

Who knew the word "independence" was religious?