Frequent readers of this site, and followers of the Internet dark comedy that is Conservapedia’s day-to-day existence, will know that Conservapedia’s handpicked administrators (“sysops”) scrupulously avoid contact with the outside world, battling even the incursion of new ideas with a zealotry typically reserved for suicide bombers. Indeed, the nerdier among us (like yours truly) could say that a discussion with a Conservapedia sysop is rarer than news from Gondolin.
Credit where it’s due, then, to Tony Sidaway, whose two-article coverage of Conservapedia drew responses from two members of Conservapedia’s higher echelons, igniting a battle with Conservapedia critics taking advantage of this rare opportunity for mutual discussion. Both of Tony’s articles (the first on the site in general; the second on its recent parody affliction) and the comments sections are must-reads for interested parties. To be sure, Tony gets a lot wrong, particularly in his pigeonholing of RationalWiki – that is, after all, what happens when you walk into a show at intermission – but the dialog elicited is valuable for clearing up several misconceptions, and exposing the depths of Conservapedia’s delusions of grandeur.
In bigger news, per discussions with some of the same sysops, we have reason to expect that Conservapedia will further “circle its wagons” by implementing the “flagged revisions” MediaWiki extension sometime next week. To the uninitiated, “FlaggedRevs” is a means of ex ante quality control, whereby edits to popular, controversial, or newsworthy articles are screened prior to being made visible. Wikipedia is in the process of implementing the same, to meet the embarrassing problem of nefarious editors misrepresenting breaking news. Ironically, Conservapedia roundly condemned Wikipedia for going down the FlaggedRevs route, characterizing it as a means of entrenching Wikipedia’s “liberal bias”… when we can be certain that Conservapedia’s FlaggedRevs implementation would be complete, and leveraged to utterly eliminate any “liberal” edits to their putatively “objective” compendium of knowledge.
Upon information from the same sources, FlaggedRev’s appeal to Conservapedia’s administration stems from its perceived ability to completely eliminate “vandalism,” which they define roughly as “any edits which dare conflict even incidentally with Andy Schlafly’s worldview.” This modest goal it would probably accomplish. But if implemented cross-wiki and deployed as “liberally” as their blocking and protection policies, it would also cut the editing population of Conservapedia down to a handful, prove once and for all that the values cherished by the Conservapedia population simply cannot withstand meaningful ideological challenge, and entrench rather than solve Conservapedia’s inability to distinguish legitimate fundamentalist editors from parodists. This – not “vandalism” – has always been the greatest danger to Conservapedia’s existence, as proved by the half-dozen trusted editors who’ve turned out to be subversives bent on driving away productive-but-moderate editors (Richard, MexMax, Bugler, Rodweathers, SSchultz, JJacobs, etc.). But Conservapedia’s susceptibility to parody stems not from its software, but from its worldview: and lord knows that’s not going to change.
I don’t understand where Tony’s coming from when he says that open editing would benefit Conservapedia. Wouldn’t that just turn it into Wikipedia? That is, we already have an online encyclopedia with open editing. You can’t just tell people to ‘write conservatively’, and encouraging that may well attract more people who are offended at the notion of a conservative encyclopedia than people who appreciate the idea. I wonder what he thinks the difference would be between the Wikipedia and Conservapedia ‘Barack Obama’, ‘Liberal’, and ‘evolution’ articles in an ideal world.
I also don’t see the problem with parody. The motivations of an editor hardly seem to matter; what matters is whether his contributions are up to the standards of the wiki. It doesn’t matter if you edit wikipedia in order to demonstrate its ‘liberal bias’ – as long as you produce something that the other editors are fine with, you’ve usefully contributed.
Especially given the speed with which Schlafly and friends correct any edit that they have the slightest problem with, the views expressed by a lasting parody edit seem to be the kinds of things that would be considered legitimate contributions if added in good faith. Everyone wins – Conservapedia has an article with content that it thinks is appropriate for its encyclopedia, and everyone else can take the instance of Poe’s law as more evidence that Schlafly’s completely nuts.
Posted by Gotchaye | January 31, 2009, 2:48 pmTo offer a clarifying example: I think that most people would agree that the Sokal affair was a perfectly acceptable way of demonstrating that postmodern writing is largely nonsense. Most of us don’t really care that Sokal wrote his paper with the intention of fooling people because his motivation was irrelevant to the point he was making. The whole point was that the paper was indistinguishable from others, written in good faith, that were perfectly acceptable to the journal.
Posted by Gotchaye | January 31, 2009, 3:00 pmAt the rate Schlafly is going by this time next year it’ll be just him and his mom writing rambling hate mail to various liberals and posting it as articles. Good riddance to it all.
Posted by Jello | January 31, 2009, 9:09 pmGotchaye, open editing on Wikipedia isn’t just a free-for-all, it’s subject to strong policies, namely neutral point of view, verifiability, no original research (and an especially stringent version of all, known as Biographies of living persons, for statements about living people).
It would be quite possible for Conservapedia to define its own policies in place of neutral point of view–call it Conservative point of view if you like. Editing on Conservapedia over time under such a policy would converge on a quite different content from that of Wikipedia.
Posted by Tony Sidaway | February 1, 2009, 10:43 amThe problem I have with parody on Conservapedia, as opposed to parody of Conservapedia on other sites, is the same problem I have with trolls and vandals putting crap on any wiki.
Posted by Tony Sidaway | February 1, 2009, 10:50 amTony, re #4, that’s probably true. The problem is that Conservapedia refuses to acknowledge that conservatism could be anything other than objective truth.
Posted by Ames | February 1, 2009, 12:12 pmActually, Wikipedia only functions because it has the buy-in of a large number of its editors. You can have any policy you want, if you don’t have the buy-in of the editors, a wiki will never work.
I actually think Conservapedia’s biggest problem is its top-down structure. You can’t stifle the volunteer contributions of editors on a whim based on arbitrarily enforced and illogical rules. Combined with the hijacking of articles–closing them so only the most ultraconservative sysops can edit, and stifling any discussion to the contrary–it’s surprising that the Conservapedia wiki-community is not more dysfunctional.
A successful wiki will always rely on a bottom-up structure, find ways to show respect for as many contributors as possible, and allow articles (even controversial ones) to be edited.
In addition, there is certainly parody and vandalism on Wikipedia, too, I might add. I would suspect 100s of high school student vanadalize Wikipedia daily. I think hard-core Wikipedian give more credit to Wikipedia than a lot of outsiders do.
Posted by Ian | February 1, 2009, 1:47 pmTony: As Ian said, though, Wikipedia doesn’t rely on a small number of superusers to enforce all of its policies. I understand that there are sets of guidelines which would result in something distinct from Wikipedia in principle, but I don’t see how you’d make them stick. Editing on Wikipedia isn’t a free-for-all, but it’s still mob rule, and it works because they can all agree to be more or less neutral. That isn’t really feasible for a right-leaning encyclopedia, though, I think. I’m honestly curious – how do you imagine the Conservapedia ‘Liberal’ and ‘evolution’ articles would look with open editing?
And I think there’s a distinction between trolling/vandalism and parody. As I see it, there are basically three kinds of insincere edits one can make to a wiki. There’s obvious vandalism, like replacing every instance of ‘the’ with ‘penis’. There’s also subtle vandalism, such as intentionally getting facts wrong when writing an article (giving a date that’s several hundred years off, for example). And then there’s parody, where the parodist’s contribution is indistinguishable from that of a valued editor.
There’s a big difference between subtle vandalism and parody. Subtle vandalism can sneak past other editors, but it does it by not being noticed. If it were noticed, it would be removed – the content added by the subtle vandal is not content that regular editors would want in the encyclopedia. Parody, on the other hand, gets by other editors by being acceptable in itself. It is noticed, but it isn’t removed – the content is valued. You’re not a vandal if the person whose stuff you’re vandalizing likes what you’re doing, whatever your motivations.
Posted by Gotchaye | February 1, 2009, 4:45 pm