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Essay:Truth and accuracy matter (view source)
Revision as of 02:40, August 20, 2017
, 02:40, August 20, 2017Additional comment from SamHB
In an era of [[fake news]], foreign governments using social media to manipulate public opinion, and impolite public discourse, Conservapedia maintaining high standards is more important than ever. We are the trustworthy encyclopedia.
In an era of [[fake news]], foreign governments using social media to manipulate public opinion, and impolite public discourse, Conservapedia maintaining high standards is more important than ever. We are the trustworthy encyclopedia.
==Comment by SamHB==
While essays are supposed to be "owned" by a single individual, there are some things I'd like to say about truth and accuracy, and this essay seems to be just the right place for it.
Over the last several months I have become increasingly aware of, and disturbed by, the ease with which falsehoods and misrepresentations can find their way into articles. In the past, I've somewhat been able to keep up with it, pointing out that an article linked from a Conservapedia page ''does not say'' what the Conservapedia article says it does. But I can't come anywhere near to keeping up anymore.
I think this started with the [[Fake news]] article. I tried to make a few small edits to help maintain its accuracy, and I realized that I was falling behind. I couldn't keep up with the rate at which nonsense is being added.
:'''It's very easy to pour garbage into an article. Doing the necessary research to get the facts right requires a much larger amount of painstaking work. The deck is stacked against those of us trying to get the facts straight.'''
So I tracked a few falsehoods down. One of them appears to have been vaped, and I didn't keep notes on it. I believe it was on mainpage talk. It said that James Fields (the guy who drove his car into a crowd at Charlottesville) was connected to, and supported by, Hillary Clinton and George Soros. I followed the link, and the article ''said nothing of the kind.'' It seems to have disappeared in a vaping. Another one that comes to mind is a claim that 35,000 people voted illegally in North Carolina 2016, and there is research to prove it. I tracked down that research. It describes a large project to go over voting lists across the country, looking for multiple people with the same name and date of birth, and checking their social security numbers. In a country with 300 million people, many hits on name and date of birth are likely to be found. But the article points out that most of those hits had different social security numbers, so they were false positives. Furthermore, the survey did not have access to data on whether people voted, so the actual hits could not be evaluated for fraudulent voting. I doubt that most people take the trouble to remove themselves from voting lists when they move. But this didn't stop the Conservapedia article from claiming that there were 35,000 instance of double voting.
It's just too much to keep up with.
[[Category:Essays]]
[[Category:Essays]]
[[Category:Conservapedia]]
[[Category:Conservapedia]]