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Conservapedia (; ) is an English-language, wiki-based, online encyclopedia written from a self-described American conservative and fundamentalist Christian point of view. The website was established in 2006 by American attorney and activist Andrew Schlafly, son of Phyllis Schlafly, to counter what he perceived as a liberal bias on Wikipedia. It uses editorials and a wiki-based system for content generation.
Examples of Conservapedia's ideology include its accusations against and strong criticism of former US president Barack Obama—including advocacy of Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories—along with criticisms of atheism, feminism, homosexuality, the Democratic Party, and evolution. Conservapedia views Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as promoting moral relativism, claims that abortion increases risk of breast cancer, praises Republican politicians, supports celebrities and artistic works it believes represent moral standards in line with Christian family values, and espouses fundamentalist Christian doctrines such as Young Earth creationism. Conservapedia's "Conservative Bible Project" is a Crowdsourcing retranslation of the English-language Bible which the site says to be "free of corruption by liberal untruths."
Conservapedia has received negative reactions from the mainstream media and political figures, and has been criticized by liberal and conservative critics alike for bias and inaccuracies.
, Conservapedia has more than 58,000 articles and 24 active users.
The "Eagle Forum University" online education program, which is associated with Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum organization, uses material for online courses, including U.S. history, stored on Conservapedia. Editing of Conservapedia articles related to a particular course topic is also a certain assignment for Eagle Forum University students.
Running on MediaWiki software, the site was founded in 2006, with its earliest articles dating from November 22. By January 2012, Conservapedia contained over 38,000 pages, not counting pages intended for internal discussion and collaboration, minimal "stub" articles, and other miscellany. Regular features on the front page of Conservapedia include links to news articles and blogs that the site's editors consider relevant to conservatism. Editors of Conservapedia also maintain a page titled "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia" that compiles alleged instances of bias or errors on Wikipedia pages. It was, at one point, the most-viewed page on the site.
The site's "Conservapedia Commandments" differ from Wikipedia's editorial policies, which include following a neutral point of view and avoiding original research. In response to Wikipedia's core policy of neutrality, Schlafly has stated: "It's impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral. I mean let's take a point of view, let's disclose that point of view to the reader", and "Wikipedia does not poll the views of its editors and Sysop. They make no effort to retain balance. It ends up having all the neutrality of a lynch mob."
In a March 2007 interview with The Guardian, Schlafly stated: "I've tried editing Wikipedia, and found it and the biased editors who dominate it censor or change facts to suit their views. In one case my factual edits were removed within 60 seconds—so editing Wikipedia is no longer a viable approach." On March 7, 2007, Schlafly was interviewed on BBC Radio 4's morning show, Today, opposite Wikipedia administrator Jim Redmond. Schlafly argued that the article on the Renaissance does not give sufficient credit to Christianity, that Wikipedia articles apparently prefer to use non-American spellings even though most users are American, that the article on American activities in the Philippines has a distinctly anti-American bias, and that attempts to include pro-Christian or pro-American views are removed very quickly. Schlafly also claimed that Wikipedia's allowance of both Common Era and Anno Domini notation was anti-Christian bias.
The "Conservapedia Commandments" require edits to be "family-friendly, clean, concise, and without gossip or foul language" and that users make mostly quality edits to articles. Accounts that engage in what the site considers "unproductive activity, such as 90% talk and only 10% quality edits" may be blocked. The commandments also cite United States Code 18 USC § 1470 as justification for legal action against obscene, vandalism or spam edits." Conservapedia Commandments , Conservapedia (March 21, 2007) Because of Schlafly's claim that Wikipedia's allowance of both Common Era and Anno Domini notation is anti-Christian bias, the commandments disallow use of the former.
/ref> and that Michelle Obama is secretly transgender. "Michelle Obama", Conservapedia Conservapedia cites various sources that it claims support this, including Kirthana Ramisetti, "Joan Rivers calls President Obama gay, says Michelle Obama is a 'tranny'" New York Daily New, Jul 04, 2014 In addition, it supports the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama's published birth certificate was a forgery and that he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii.
It also describes Albert Einstein's theory of relativity as part of an ideological plot by liberals. Andy Schlafly claims that "virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible." and "cites passages in the Christian Bible in an effort to disprove Einstein's theories." Arizona Jewish Post described this argument as "conflating relativity, a theory in physics about time, space and gravity, with relativism, a philosophical argument about morality and human experience having nothing to do with physics."
Conservapedia included an entry on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus, a 1998 internet hoax, with some readers being left unsure whether Conservapedia was being serious about the creature's existence. Schlafly asserted that the article was intended as a parody of environmentalism. By March 4, 2007, the entry had been deleted.
University of Maryland physics professor Robert L. Park has also criticized Conservapedia's entry on the theory of relativity, arguing that its criticism of the principle as "heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world" confuses a physical theory with a moral value.Park, Robert L. "Conservapedia: Countering the Liberal Bias of Wikipedia" . BobPark.org; August 13, 2010. Similarly, New Scientist stated at the end of their article:
In October 2010, Scientific American criticized Conservapedia's attitude towards the theory of relativity, assigning them a zero score on their 0 to 100 fallacy-versus-fact "Science Index", describing Conservapedia as "the online encyclopedia run by conservative lawyer Andrew Schlafly, which implies that Einstein's theory of relativity is part of a liberal plot."
Another Conservapedia claim is that "Albert Einstein's work had nothing to do with the development of the atomic bomb", and that relativity had no practical applications.
In 2007, John Cotey of the St. Petersburg Times observed that the Conservapedia article about the Democratic Party contained a criticism about the party's alleged support for same-sex marriage, and associated the party with the homosexual agenda.
The Conservapedia entries on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama are critical of their respective subjects. During the 2008 presidential campaign, its entry on Obama asserted that he "has no clear personal achievement that cannot be explained as the likely result of affirmative action." Some Conservapedia editors urged that the statement be changed or deleted, but Schlafly, a former classmate of Obama, responded by asserting that the Harvard Law Review, the Harvard University legal journal for which Obama and Schlafly worked together,, Group photo; A. Schlafly is second row from the top, second from left; B. Obama is in the third row from top, 7th from left. Retrieved from Harvard University Library Visual Information Access, August 10, 2011. See also Harvard Law Review#Alumni. uses and stated, "The statement about affirmative action is accurate and will remain in the entry." In addition, Hugh Muir of The Guardian mockingly referred to Conservapedia's assertion that Obama has links to radical Islam as "dynamite" and an excellent resource for "US rightwingers."
In contrast, the articles about conservative politicians, such as former U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan and former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, have been observed as praising their respective subjects. Mark Sabbatini of the Juneau Empire described the Conservapedia entry on Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate for the 2008 U.S. presidential election, as having been written largely by people friendly to its subject and avoiding controversial topics.
Tom Flanagan, a conservative professor of political science at the University of Calgary, has argued that Conservapedia is more about religion, specifically Christianity, than political or social conservatism and that it "is far more guilty of the crime they're attributing to Wikipedia" than Wikipedia itself. Matt Millham of the military-oriented newspaper Stars and Stripes called Conservapedia "a Web site that caters mostly to evangelical Christians." Its scope as an encyclopedia, according to its founders, "offers a historical record from a Christian and conservative perspective." APC magazine perceives this to be representative of Conservapedia's own problem with bias. Conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher has been highly critical of the website's "Conservative Bible Project", an ongoing retranslation of the Bible which Dreher attributes to "insane hubris" on the part of "right-wing ideologues."
The project has also been criticized for presenting a False dilemma between conservatism and liberalism, as well as between Christian fundamentalism and atheism, and for promoting relativism with the implicit idea that there "often are two equally valid interpretations of the facts." Matthew Sheffield, writing in the conservative daily newspaper The Washington Times, argued that conservatives concerned about bias should contribute more often to Wikipedia rather than use Conservapedia as an alternative since he felt that alternative websites like Conservapedia are often "incomplete." Author Damian Thompson asserts that the purpose of Conservapedia is to "dress up nonsense as science."
Bryan Ochalla, writing for the LGBTQ people magazine The Advocate, referred to the project as "Wikipedia for the bigoted."Bryan Ochalla, "Wikipedia for the bigoted." The Advocate, March 25, 2008, p. 12. On the satirical news program The Daily Show, comedian Lewis Black lampooned its article on homosexuality. Black highlighted Conservapedia's introductory sentence "homosexuality is an immoral sexual lifestyle." In response, he said: "On Conservapedia, 'gay' sounds way more interesting!" Writing in The Australian, columnist Emma Jane described Conservapedia as "a disturbing parallel universe where the ice age is a theoretical period, intelligent design is empirically testable, and relativity and geology are ."
Opinions criticizing the site rapidly spread throughout the blogosphere around early 2007. Schlafly appeared on radio programs Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and All Things Considered on NPR to discuss the site around that time. In May 2008, Schlafly and one of his homeschooled students appeared on the CBC program The Hour for the same purpose.
Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times quoted two Conservapedia editors who commented favorably about Conservapedia. Matt Barber, policy director for the conservative Christian political action group Concerned Women for America, praised Conservapedia as a more family-friendly and "accurate" alternative to Wikipedia.
Wired magazine, in an article entitled "Ten Impressive, Weird And Amazing Facts About Wikipedia", highlighted several of Conservapedia's articles, including those on "Atheism and obesity" and "Hollywood values", amongst others. It also highlighted Conservapedia's "Examples of bias in Wikipedia" article, which encourages readers to contact Jimmy Wales and tell him to "sort it out."
Conservapedia's use of Wikipedia's format to create a conservative Christian alternative encyclopedia has been mirrored by other sites, such as Godtube, QubeTV and MyChurch, which adopted the format of the more prominent YouTube and Myspace, respectively.
Wikipedia's co-creator Jimmy Wales said about Conservapedia that "free culture knows no bounds" and "the reuse of our work to build variants is directly in line with our mission." Wales denied Schlafly's claims of liberal bias in Wikipedia.
In 2022, Slate noted that Conservapedia "has long floundered with minimal readership."
RationalWiki's self-stated purpose is to analyze and refute "pseudoscience", the "anti-science movement", and "crank ideas", as well as to conduct "explorations of authoritarianism and fundamentalism" and explore "how these subjects are handled in the media."Keeler, Mary, Josh Johnson, and Arun Majumdar. "Crowdsourced Knowledge: Peril and Promise for Complex Knowledge Systems."
RationalWiki is said to openly criticize Conservapedia, for a majority of reasons.
An article published in the Los Angeles Times in 2007 alleged that RationalWiki members "monitor Conservapedia. And—by their own admission—engaged in acts of cyber-vandalism."
The exchange, recorded on a Conservapedia page entitled "Lenski dialog", was widely reported on news-aggregating sites and web logs. Carl Zimmer wrote that it was readily apparent that "Schlafly had not bothered to read Lenski's closely", and PZ Myers criticized Schlafly for demanding data despite having neither a plan to use it nor the expertise to analyze it. During and after the Lenski dialogue on Conservapedia, several users on the site were blocked for "insubordination" for expressing disagreement with Schlafly's stance on the issue. Conservapedia has a little hangup over evolution , Charles Arthur, July 1, 2008, The Guardian Technology blog
The dialogue between Lenski and Conservapedia is noted in Richard Dawkins' in a chapter concerning Lenski's research.Chapter 5: "Before our very eyes (examples of evolution observed)"
The Bible project has met with extensive criticism, including from fellow evangelistic Christian conservatives. Rod Dreher, a conservative writer and editor, described the project as "insane hubris" and "crazy"; he further described the project as "It's like what you'd get if you crossed the Jesus Seminar with the College Republican chapter at a rural institution of Bible learnin. Ed Morrissey, another conservative Christian writer, wrote that bending the word of God to one's own ideology makes God subservient to an ideology, rather than the other way around. Creation Ministries International wrote "Forcing the Bible to conform to a certain political agenda, no matter if one happens to agree with that agenda, is a perversion of the Word of God and should therefore be opposed by Christians as much as 'politically correct' Bibles." Politicizing Scripture: Should Christians welcome a 'conservative Bible translation'? (Lita Cosner, Creation Ministries International, December 24, 2009)
On October 7, 2009, Stephen Colbert called for his viewers to incorporate him into the Conservapedia Bible as a biblical figure and viewers responded by editing the Conservapedia Bible to include his name. The edits were, as a matter of course, treated as vandalism and removed. This was followed by an interview between Colbert and Schlafly on December 8, 2009.
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