I always thought it was just a compendium of right wing lies. But this is too ridiculous (surely) to be taken seriously by anyone:
From their Harry Potter entry:
It’s gotta be a parody, right? Please tell me it’s a parody.
No. It’s meant to be a serious site.
No-one knows.
In all probabilty, there are both trolls and serious people working together. But no-one can tell the difference between the two. It’s like the ending of Animal Farm.
It’s a Wiki run by extremely conservative right wing biblical literalists. Basically, that means if you can spin the bible into any kind of anti- left/socialist/atheist/catholic/moderate story, it stays in. If you try to put any kind of decency or moral thought or even plain facts that contradict the founders’ politics in, your edits will get removed and you’ll get banned.
In other words, rest assured that the project is sincere even while it’s filled with parody - it’s just too hard to parody, because only the most extreme parody is taken seriously by the moderators (the rest is rejected for being too “liberal”).
I tend to agree with the “no one knows” set. Like all wikis, it is what the users do with it that counts. If you want to treat it as a parody, go for it. If not, go for it as well.
Here’s Andy Schlafly (founder of conservapedia) on the Colbert report
And yes, his project “to make the bible conservative” is serious too, as far as I can see. He’s a fucking creep.
The site was originally sincere, but there is a large subset (probably a majority) that see it as a place to see what inanities they can get away with.
The Conservapedia entry on Poe’s Law. This may qualify as a quine.
Every time I try to read that site I start out laughing out loud, but end up getting angry at the level of willful ignorance, dishonesty, and stupidity. I can’t stay at that site for any length of time.
It’s impossible to tell for certain just like it’s impossible to know any other motive for certain. Additionally, a certain species of commentator on every forum (it seems) thrives on insisting that everyone even a little outside of the norm is ‘trolling’ or ‘putting us on’ or similar; when they do it for Pat Buchanan it’s one thing, as his gains from playing the crowd are obvious, but it’s difficult to tell what Andy Schlafly has to gain from Conservapedia that’s worth all his efforts.
So the working hypothesis is that Conservapedia was begun with intentions as serious as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia’s (a triumph in the field of political reference works) were, and that at least some of the current contributors still intend to do precisely what the site’s banner and other statements of purpose declare.
That’s not coherent enough to be an example of anything, for or against.
Here’s what the founder had to say about the theory of relativity:
And this is what scientists have to say about the sanctity of general relativity.
(Yes, I know that this is shooting fish in a barrel. It’s just that I happened to read this article not ten minutes ago.)
Well, there is historical precedent: ‘Jewish Physics’ and ‘Bourgeois pseudoscience’, only replace ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ or ‘Bourgeois’ with ‘liberal’.
That isn’t enough to guarantee he’s faking, mind you; it might be evidence in favor of it, though, had he not sunk quite so much energy into this low-payoff Conservapedia project. On the gripping hand, it is entirely possible for someone’s stupid behavior and stupid statements to be caused, not by some hidden genius for performance art and a love of trolling, but by stupidity. This can be fairly difficult to get everyone to accept as a viable least hypothesis.
Exactly.
Oh, Schafly’s serious all right. He’s also dumber than a sack of hammers. If I didn’t know who was running it, I’d think it was fake too.
As far as trolls – they’d have to be pretty subtle, since he’s extremely anal about that place.
Coming soon, BibleTropes; keep you clicking and reading for hours.
The Bible is absolutely full of tropes, according to TV Tropes.
Seriously. It’s a huge page. Check it out.
Dammit, beaten to the punch by reality once again.
Wow. Scary stuff.
Real or not though, it makes for some great reading - I love the wikipedia entry:
And their definition of a liberal is hilarious:
If it ain’t a joke, it’ll do till the joke gets here!