Conservapedia: Infuriating and Malicious

Question: What do you get when people with a political and religious agenda decide to create their own version of Wikipedia? Answer: Conservapedia.

From their own “About” page:

We do not allow liberal bias to deceive and distort here.

The sheer hypocrisy of this statement is astonishing. Articles I have skim-read include those on Evolution, Atheism, Homosexuality and (just LOL) The Great Flood and are completely biased far beyond anything I’ve ever seen on Wikipedia.

Make no mistake, this is not even an attempt to distill information of subjectivity. This is an attempt to shield people from consensual truths which right-wing bigots and religious zealots find uncomfortable or incompatible with their belief systems.

Now, it’s fair enough to have all of this “information” on a website; I’m a strong believer in Freedom of Speech. The most infuriating aspect of this is that somehow, there is a plethora of genuinely useful and legitimate information on there, diluting the bullshit considerably. Earlier today I had searched Google for “matrix multiplication suffix notation” and the Conservapedia article Matrix was the top result. It is clear to me that the intention of this project is to blur the line between fact and fiction, to teach objectively and subjectively in order to mislead, and to cast doubt in the mind of the reader on issues that are as plain as black and white in the Real World.

I consider this one of the highest crimes of humanity; the corruption of the human mind. Alas, this is only really a 21st century extension of an age-old war, and with the Web rapidly supplanting all other formats as information outlets, I suppose it was only a matter of time before those who were brainwashed as kids by colouring books and Sunday School grew up and took it to the tubes.

Of course, the right way to combat this is to make sure that the best information is in its rightful place: Wikipedia. So that’s why I’m going there right now to figure out why Wikipedia wasn’t in the search results. Hopefully, other people will do the same.

The Wikipedia article on Conservapedia is an interesting read.