Difference between revisions of "Conservapedia:Community Portal"

Revision as of 14:32, December 29, 2016

Community Portal/Archives

This page contains some material that has been moved from Talk:Main_Page. We are attempting to get general discussion of issues relating to Conservapedia's content and policies on this page, leaving the main talk page for its original purpose of discussing the content of the Main Page.

On proper grammar, or, did you know that most of the population of Texas is homosexual?

I have chided Cons repeatedly on proper punctuation, particularly regarding subordinate clauses and compound sentences. For a sample, see User_talk:SamHB#Re:_Aburke.

Well, it turns out that the same errors can show up in unexpected places, like the Texas Republican party’s official platform. It has:

See this.

Watch those commas!!!! SamHB (talk) 11:57, 20 May 2016 (EDT)

Wow. And shouldn't it be "have been ordained" rather than "has been ordained"? RobS ^{Pat Nixon for President} 13:12, 20 May 2016 (EDT)

States and Governors

I mentioned this earlier, but nothing happened - here are the U.S. states with red-linked governors:

It seems that Doug Ducey even isn't any longer governor of Arizona! The overall look of the articles on the smaller states is quite abysmal - and often outdated. As I am not American, I do not feel up to editing these articles in detail, but I have to ask: If they cannot use Conservapedia even to check who the governor of an U.S. state is, what will high-school pupils think of it? They have to rely on Wikipedia to get up-dated information!

It would be nice to have articles on the governors, too, just to check their political priorities. --AugustO (talk) 05:11, 24 May 2016 (EDT)

I know a fair amount about political concepts, people I can have a hand in electing, and other well-known political figures. However, I know little about--if you'll pardon the expression--lesser politicians, who have little significance to me. Therefore, I'm sorry to say that I know almost nothing about these governors. However, I've done a little on a couple of them. I may do more, but all I can do is research then write based on what I find. It could be hopelessly inaccurate, but I have no way of knowing. For this reason, I'm trying not to add too much detail, since I don't want to make fa lse statements. If anyone else knows anything about them, please add to or revise what I've written! --David B (talk) 11:01, 24 May 2016 (EDT)

Well spoken, David. Speak of what you know; not of what some website wants you to believe. AlanE (talk) 02:57, 26 May 2016 (EDT)

One column footnoting vs. two column footnoting and mobile devices

For this article Operation Compass I added footnoting code at the bottom of the article for the new editor.

If you look at the article, you will see that the footnoting is one column footnoting and not two column footnoting.

I think I recall reading that one column footnoting is better for mobile device readers, but I am not sure. Do you know if this is the case or not?

Also, if you look at my edit which is HERE, you will see that my column width is colwidth=30em . I think this might be better for mobile devices as well, but I am not sure.

If I am right about these two matters, I think Conservapedia's manual of style should be updated. Also, we might want to clean up our most high traffic articles so one column format is used.

Does anyone know about these matters? I ask because a lot of people are using mobile devices now. Conservative (talk) 03:11, 5 June 2016 (EDT)

I don't know, but I have a testing platform I might be able to use tomorrow, if no one else knows either. It would have sense that single columns would be better, but the Wiki software comes with a mobile mode, so this might counteract columns. I'll try to get back to you on this. --David B (talk) 23:26, 5 June 2016 (EDT)

I'll do some real-world testing tomorrow, but if you click the "Mobile View" link in CP's footer (here's the direct link), you can see that columns are removed completely. Therefore, it seems that it shouldn't matter what we do for columns. --David B (talk) 00:38, 6 June 2016 (EDT)

A big problem with 2 column footnotes is that if there are a small number of footnotes, it will break them up with only one or two words in the second column. It does not have code to put the column break between two different footnotes. Thank you DavidB for cleaning this up. JDano (talk) 04:39, 6 June 2016 (EDT)

I'm not very good at designing templates for Wikis, but I wonder if someone could fix that. Anyway, I did a little testing and all the mobile platforms I tried did load the wiki's mobile view, with the single column of references. I even tried the Atheism article, with its three columns and had the same result, even if it was painfully slow due to the size of the page. It looks like we can do columns for computers only without worrying about mobile viewing. If you have anything else you want me to check, though, let me know! --David B (talk) 08:39, 6 June 2016 (EDT)

OK. Thanks. Conservative (talk) 10:32, 6 June 2016 (EDT)

Is Trump the new Zachary Taylor?

That's what this article argues: "How an outsider president killed a party." Taylor, elected president in 1848, was the ultimate outsider candidate, even more so than Trump. He had no political experience whatsoever, and he proudly boasted that he had never even voted. When he was nominated by the Whig Party, he was known only as the commander who defeated the Mexicans at Buena Vista. But I can't agree with the article's headline. Taylor was not the guy responsible for the downfall of the Whigs. That would be Millard Fillmore, Taylor's vice president. If Taylor was the non-ideological celebrity candidate of 1848, Fillmore was a true believer, a Whig version of Ted Cruz. Whig ideology called for the president to defer to Congress. Taylor died in office after a year. When Fillmore succeed, the long-frustrated "ultra Whigs" finally got their day in the sun. It was a disaster. Although personally opposed to slavery, Fillmore deferred to Congress as a good Whig. This meant strictly enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. It was a combination of views made him hugely unpopular, both in the North and in the South. The party collapsed in 1852. PeterKa (talk) 02:50, 10 June 2016 (EDT)

They're at it again

Is there anyone around who can block these people? There still creating accounts. Maybe we should add "1.888.811.4532" to the spam filter. SamHB (talk) 22:22, 11 September 2016 (EDT)

Blocked--finally. You're right, they keep using text from the same crawls of Amazon and Quickbooks. It should be easy to add temporary entries to the spam filter. --David B ^(TALK) 23:14, 11 September 2016 (EDT)

They're still at it. --1990'sguy (talk) 10:48, 13 September 2016 (EDT)

Is the server clock messed up?

The clock seems to be a few hours fast. According to what it says, I'm going to try to repair the E=mc^2 article at about 04:30. It is now 00:46 EDT. Or have you switched to UTC? I thought CP was on EST/EDT. SamHB (talk) 00:47, 1 October 2016 (EDT)

Never mind. It's back on EDT now. SamHB (talk) 00:59, 1 October 2016 (EDT)

Fair use images

What is our policy on fair use of copyrighted or trademark-protected images? Please take a look at: . Thanks, JDano (talk) 06:29, 9 November 2016 (EST)

I am not aware of a specific, written code to follow regarding this on CP. In general, I think most people here try to avoid copyrighted images. However, some use them as WP does (any image, anytime, anywhere can be uses under Fair Use, it seems is their policy), and no one here seems to object. Personal, I try to avoid copyrights except when the copyright is help by an organization friendly to CP. Answers In Genesis I have no problem with, because it is my assumption that I probably have the legal right, but in any case I expect they appreciate friendly publicity. I could always be wrong, though...

Trademark laws are a little less restrictive, and since we are not selling a product under their trademark, it is my understanding that it is usually acceptable to use these images. However, if they are also copyrighted, I usually will not. Even in court, Fair Use is a pain, because it is ambiguous, but I'd advise that you err on the side of caution. I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that for the most part, each person does what they think is right. (Perhaps like "...every man did that which was right in his own eyes." -Judges 21:25?)

I'll stop rambling in just a moment, but a pseudo-legal definition I've heard is "Spontaneous usage of a portion of a work for a purpose which generates no profit for the user, nor takes profit from the owner." Other definitions I've heard almost always also include some element of spontaneity, such as a teacher sees an article online, prints off a page or two of it, and hands it out to the class for study in class. I don't know where to draw the line, though. As you probably know better than I, WP seems to assume that anything is fine to use, since it is for education purposes and does not directly generate revenue for them (though nice articles tend to lead to more donations). It may be alright to use this policy since they get away with it, but I personally prefer not to risk it for the most part. Perhaps an admin here knows more on the topic. I know I've spoken to Jpatt about copyright issues before, so you could always try asking him directly, if you don't get a satisfactory answer here. --David B ^(TALK) 13:31, 19 November 2016 (EST)

This is the guidelines for images here:[1] Karajou (talk) 13:45, 19 November 2016 (EST)

Hillary's Downfall

The original (and still hysterically funny) version is here. This version is updated for 2016. PeterKa (talk) 00:33, 18 November 2016 (EST)

Browser search engine: Conservapedia

It seems that most browsers have Wikipedia listed as one of the available search engines. It occurs to me that some might find the same useful for CP. What do you all think? I've stared a page to show what I'm thinking. Can I get some input?
One important factor is that I don't think this can be easily set up for Internet Explorer. Also, Firefox is being a problem, but I may be able to assemble an XML file that works. Is something like this worth publishing? (see: User:DavidB4/search conservapedia) --David B ^(TALK) 01:36, 23 November 2016 (EST)

Math conundrum

This meme started in Japan and is confounding people across the Internet:

x=9-3÷⅓+1 PeterKa (talk) 04:45, 27 November 2016 (EST)

Are you suggesting that if a high school student read CP, he could not find what he needs to answer this correctly? JDano (talk) 03:10, 29 December 2016 (EST)

Was Hitler a Catholic?

The article Liberal myths says "They claim Hitler was a Catholic." The article Christian In Name Only says "Despite being raised Roman Catholic and claiming that Jesus was his inspiration, Hitler was only using Christianity to gain favor with the German people. His true beliefs were based off of his social darwinistic views." It also includes "The Catholic Church" as all being XINO. What are we trying to communicate here? That liberals are wrong in claiming that Hitler was a Catholic in name only, or that because Hitler was raised a Catholic, even if Hitler had remained a faithful practitioner of Catholicism, he would still be just a XINO? Or that liberals claim that Hitler was true to the teaching and spirit of the Catholic Church in his every thought and deed? Or is it a liberal myth that the complexity of Christianity can be reduced to a short list of XINOs? Please help! JDano (talk) 03:10, 29 December 2016 (EST)

My beliefs my differ from CPs, but as I understand it, Hitler claimed to be a catholic to win favor. He was not (he was actually very involved in the occult) but even if he had been, it would have been questionable whether he was a Christian or not. His actions proved he was not a Christian or a catholic, however, so I suppose you could say he was two-fold Christian in name only. --David B ^(TALK) 09:32, 29 December 2016 (EST)