The Alternate Universe, Documented

You know about Wikipedia, a vastly successful and useful kind of on-line encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Studies have found its error rate to be slightly higher than Britannica's, but on the other hand it may take decades to make a change in Britannica, whereas Wikipedia can be fixed as soon as sombody sees an error.

A wiki, in case you haven't been in on this, is a kind of web site that the user can modify. At first they were mainly used as a kind of whiteboard for groups, where everybody could leave notes or update the plan or whatever, but with Wikipedia the form grew to maturity. It's a crazy idea, on the face of it, that just anybody can write the encyclopedia, but ... I've made changes to it, haven't you? Where you might expect it to degenerate into vandalism and grafitti, there are just enough rules, just enough checks on the behavior of users, to keep the thing in good shape. Oh, there are errors and abuses, but in general everyone relies on it as a pretty good source of information on a gazillion topics.

Problem: it's got too many facts. Too much reality, not enough faith.

So now there's Conservapedia. As they say:

Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American. On Wikipedia, many of the dates are provided in the anti-Christian “C.E.” instead of “A.D.”, which Conservapedia uses. Christianity receives no credit for the great advances and discoveries it inspired, such as those of the Renaissance. Read a list of many Examples of Bias in Wikipedia.

Conservapedia is an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America. Conservapedia has easy-to-use indexes to facilitate review of topics. You will much prefer using Conservapedia compared to Wikipedia if you want concise answers free of “political correctness”.

Actually, Conservapedia is good if you want to avoid all kinds of correctness.

Like, this is from their authoritative discussion of the Theory of Evolution:

Supporters propound upon the Theory of Evolution as if it has scientific support. They switch tactics when pressed against the wall with solid scientific proofs against the Theory of Evolution by stating that evolution is “only” a theory. Using this flip-flop approach they try to have it both ways. They claim scientific support when none exists, and they claim it is only a theory when the theory straddles them with outlandish, impossible conclusion that violate scientific truths.

Nobody can tell how much of this is parody and how much is for real. The rightwing site Townhall recommends it, they seem to think it's for real. I think it is.

I'm having some trouble getting the site to come up this morning, mmm I suppose there are just so many people using it as a reference.

Some of the folks at Science Blogs are having fun with this. For a joke they edit the Conservapedia with actual scientific facts and then wait to see how long it takes for it to get changed back. Or even for the contributor to get banned from the site. It's usually just a matter of several minutes.

Just a fascinating idea. Create your own reality, and then annotate it in minute detail. Let's watch how this works over the next weeks and months.