We’ve written about Citizendium (The Chronicle, October 27, 2006) and Scholarpedia (The Chronicle, January 11), but there’s yet another open-source Web site that’s hoping to chip into Wikipedia’s sizable fan base. So far, though, most commentators have viewed Conservapedia as the butt of jokes, not a brave new way forward.
The site is, as its name suggests, a conservative response to what it bills as Wikipedia’s “increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American” sentiment. Predictably, left-leaning blogs have had a field day with that statement, and they’ve relished many of Conservapedia’s more florid phrasings: Ronald Reagan is “considered by many to be the greatest American President,” for example, and kangaroos have legs that are “strong and powerful, designed by God for leaping.” (To be fair to the site, left-wing pranksters have already logged on to add plenty of their own parodic passages, so it’s hard to know how much of Conservapedia’s material was written by card-carrying conservatives.)
While many pundits have treated the site as a cheap joke, Conservapedia does raise a few substantive issues. The site was founded by Andy Schlafly, a conservative writer and attorney (and the son of Phyllis Schlafly, the right-wing activist who founded the Eagle Forum), and much of the foundational material was written by home-schooled high-school students from New Jersey. Writing for The Guardian, Conor Clarke sees in Conservapedia’s creation story “the logical conclusion of a slightly worrying trend:” Conservapedia, as its name implies, does not aspire to objectivity. Nor does it aspire to fairness. It aspires to give you the impression that there’s always a second, equally valid interpretation of the facts.
Does Mr. Clarke have a point? Or are fears about the influence of this nascent Web site much ado about nothing? —Brock Read