Fed up with Wikipedia? How creating your own encylopedia can backfire

What happens if you’re a group that doesn’t like the collababorative nature of the internet, particularly sites like Wikipedia, where members keep changing the “truth”? You create your own media of course. In a twist that’s reminiscent of war time propaganda, a chap called Andy Schafly created a mirror of Wikipedia called Conservapedia that wasn’t subject to Wikipedia’s apparent liberal leftiness and all round bias.

The Guardian’s Charles Arthur spotted a development on the story, reported on Ars Technica and Panda’s Thumb, where an argument has brewed up about a scientific paper by Richard Lenski, who has been been “conducting a long-term experiment in bacterial evolution, one that has encompassed over 30,000 generations of bacteria going back over 20 years.”

It all kicked off when Andy Schafly posted an open letter on Coversvapedia calling access to Lenski’s data (he’s not that keen on evolution, see) and it would appear that doubt was cast over the validity of the experiment. Lenski didn’t take kindly to the accusation and replied in great (very great) detail about the experiment, objecting to Schafly’s letter. It’s worth a read if you have a few minutes.

As a side issue to the argument at hand (my GSCE Physics doesn’t permit me to enter the debate in any way), it raises an interesting question about the merits of controlling the message.

Follow the commandments - or else

Schafly and his group clearly didn’t like their entries being constantly being re-written and given the strength of opinion against Conservative Christianity and creationism in general, it’s not surprising that they decided to create their own version of Wikipedia.

When you visit the site, however, you’re not immediately made to feel sympathetic to their view. You’re told to read the strict Conservapedia Commandments before posting an entry “Posting of obscenity here is punishable by up to 10 years in jail …The IP addresses of vandals will be reported to authorities” (!), the entry on Lenski says he “has displayed annoyance, arrogance, and elitism when asked to release the information”. Meanwhile, a section on Wikipedia cites “liberal bias, deceit, silly gossip, and blatant errors on Wikipedia”.

I don’t think anyone would disagree with the silly gossip and blatant errors on Wikipedia (it does also have the tone of chippiness quite a lot of the time), but it’s a bold claim to say that the founders have a deliberate policy for hiding the truth. Wikipedia is a group edited by the masses. Unfortunately that means the masses have the biggest voice.

Good idea, badly deployed

Creating their own platform to voice their opinion, the team behind Conservapedia made a potentially smart move from a PR perspective. Given their situation and opinions they were probably unlikely to get a fair crack of the whip on Wikipedia. The problem is that they’ve gone too far and the site itself, in terms of tone, language and content, feels quite extremist and far too highly moderated. Yes, they’ll have a well controlled message. But will they attract new members or get a fairer hearing in blogs and the media? Probably not.

Oh and the site accuses the “leftist” Guardian of getting “hysterical, as though there is something wrong with wanting to see what the public has paid for.” But I’m sure they’ve had worse levelled at them in the past.