Submitted to a Candid World

RationalWiki, the wiki-sphere’s response to pseudoscience and radicalized religion, has reinvented itself to cover the world, and the good and bad of the blogs, from a rationalist perspective. Originally the community at RationalWiki developed as a home for intelligent Conservapedia expatriates, enraged and ready to speak out against the sidelining of science in the broader culture, and I’m thrilled to see the site focus that energy on tackling the larger problems of pseudoscience and irrationality outside of the context of Conservapedia.

But you can’t go wrong with a re-invention of the basics, either.  RationalWiki’s original claim to fame (its Conservapedia coverage) faces integration into the site’s broader context in the form of a blog-style, week-by-week focus piece on the worst of the fundamentalist side of the internets – including, occasionally, Conservapedia. First on the hit parade: Conservapedia’s “article” on “the theory of evolution,” less an article than a glorified cut-and-paste job of decontextualized (“mined”) quotes strung together with permutations of the phrase “in regards to,” and Google-bombed to the top of the Google rankings.

The only redeeming quality of a site like Conservapedia, as RationalWiki has proven, is that such compilations of idiocy occasionally have the effect of getting a group of hitherto unaffiliated people together, and giving them a good cause to fight for. A bad act may inspire such a response as to dwarf the initial evil. Cheers to RationalWiki for giving voice to the minds of a dedicated group of rationalists. May their influence continue to outstrip that of the Conservapedias of the world.