Difference between revisions of "Conservapedia:Community Portal"

Revision as of 15:17, December 13, 2014

This is the place to discuss issues of interest to the Conservapedia community.

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.

Restoring User Pages

I wonder if you [I was referring to User:Conservative in the original context] would be be so kind as to restore the following user and user-talk pages. Most of these people were long-time respected sysops and administrators, as I'm sure you, being a long-time respected sysop and administrator yourself, well know. Many of our important articles were written by these people. Current users may want to know something about the people that went before them and built Conservapedia. We should show some respect for our history and our founding fathers/mothers.

SamHB 23:33, 10 October 2014 (EDT)

Your suggestion is a reasonable one. I was not in favor of deleting user pages. But once deleted, I don't think it would be time well spent to restore the pages. Time moves on, and time could be better spent by improving substantive entries.--Andy Schlafly 00:37, 11 October 2014 (EDT)

I can see that all the active users are pretty busy, and are probably disinclined to do this. So how about letting me do it? I'm willing to restore those pages myself. You would have to give me the appropriate temporary rights, which might be "undelete" rights, or maybe full administrator rights, I don't know how this works.

I'm sure you know, from our many communications, both public and private, that I can be trusted not to harm Conservapedia in any way. During any period in which I have extra rights, I will refrain from annoying, harassing, irritating, teasing, insulting, or otherwise getting under the skin of any other user. I will not react to any taunts. I will not abuse the rights in any way. (Though if my rights include blocking, and I see any vandals come to town, I will of course take action.)

You didn't want the pages deleted? We can fix that. What say you? SamHB 12:48, 12 October 2014 (EDT)

There's an extremely troubling aspect to all this. You say you weren't in favor of deleting the pages, and yet, here, Cons says that the owner of the web site was in favor of the deletion. Was Cons lying? Also, here, Cons seems to indicate that he was in communication with you on the subject of giving JoeyJ deletion powers. These powers are not taken lightly. In fact, JoeyJ is the only non-admin who has them. So it looks as though you gave JoeyJ the deletion powers knowing full well that he would use those powers to delete user pages. What is going on? SamHB 00:05, 14 October 2014 (EDT)

God delusion

I finished reading the Prof. Dawkin's book. I have to admit that it has shaken my religious foundations... I sometimes wonder whether that has made me an Agnostic now. It has made me question a lot of my upbringing. I was a good catholic girl. I wonder what my mom will say --Maria O'Connor 12:44, 15 November 2014 (EST)

Richard Dawkins did not research or fact check his book very well and it has a number of errors in it as can be seen in this PDF version of The Irrational Atheist.

Second, how strong were your foundations before you read the book? How did you build your foundation?

In the physical life, if you are flabby, don't get enough sleep, etc., it provides an opportunity for disease to enter. The same is true in a person's spiritual life. How familiar are you with the classic defenses of the existence of God? How familiar are you with the various evidences for Christianity? See: Evidence for Christianity Did you ever repent of your sins and dedicate your life to following Jesus Christ? How often were you reading your Bible? How often were you praying? What are the most serious arguments against agnosticism? What are the most serious arguments against atheism. See: Rebuttals to atheist arguments.

Also, Jesus promises that those who repented of their sins and accept Jesus as their Savior and Lord will have communion with Him and will receive the Holy Spirit who will guide them. Did you ever know God or were you just engaging in religious rituals? Conservative 20:07, 16 November 2014 (EST)

Richard Dawkins has had his day, says Ravi Zacharias - Christianity Today, November 15, 2014 Conservative 04:04, 17 November 2014 (EST)

@Maria O'Connor: I'm really sorry that you have been abused so badly at Conservapedia. I want you to know that there are quite a number of decent and well-intentioned people here. You should ignore the abusers, and feel welcome to make contributions. We particularly need people who are knowledgeable in matters of science. If you can contribute in this area, dig in! SamHB 22:22, 20 November 2014 (EST)

Sam, you can contribute constructively to Conservapedia, or you can pick fights on the Main Page talk page. You cannot do both. VargasMilan 17:16, 21 November 2014 (EST)

Of course Sam can contribute constructively to Conservapedia whilst disagreeing with certain other editors. He's been doing it for years..... and more strength to his arm. There are not enough Sams these days. AlanE 19:36, 21 November 2014 (EST)

Subject Matter Experts

I recently had to deal with a case of someone making an edit to a chemistry article (with a note that he has a chemistry degree, which of course we can't verify, but it very well may be true) that was reverted. It's true that his use of "subjective" and "objective" could give the wrong impression to non-experts, and I have cleaned it up. But it just needed to be cleaned up. (The cleanup that someone did afterwards was ridiculous.) This person was blocked, apparently just because of that edit. This should not have happened. Quite a number of good contributors, and potential good contributors—we'll never know—have been reverted and blocked because the people with blocking powers did not know how to evaluate the edits. Now Conservapedia often has people come here and make stupid/parody/vandalism edits. But it is monitored constantly by the sysops. It is not necessary for people to be trigger-happy. Except of course for clear vandalism. I would suggest a page, probably in the Conservapedia namespace rather than "mainspace", listing subject matter experts who can make expert analyses of these things. The list should be publicized to all sysops. Contributors can volunteer as experts in various subjects. And sysops could hold off on reverting questionable edits until an expert opinion is rendered. SamHB 23:45, 28 November 2014 (EST)

Best Troll Detection of the Public

You have no proof that the person who was blocked was merely a Subject Matter Expert and not a troll as well. This ought to be dealt with by the Best Troll Detection of the Public. Trolling techniques include emphasizing words (when the logic of argument doesn't require it) to trample over anticipated reasonable opposition to one's argument with raw emotion as well as arguing about things on the Main Page talk page that don't appear on the Main Page. VargasMilan 10:55, 29 November 2014 (EST)

I can assure you that, in my 7 years here, I have developed a good sense for the kinds of vandals, trolls, parodists, sycophants, "mall cops", and other unsavory personalities that we have. I also notice other fascinating types of people, like those who complain about posting to this page not on the topic of improving the main page content while making quite a few such postings themselves (though, in fairness, they also make on-topic postings, which I rarely do), people who did not realize that they had been given blocking powers until I told them, and people who use spectacularly recondite sentences while attacking other contributors. You see, I've been around for a while.

On the matter of making posts to this page that are not directly on the topic of improving the content of the main page, I'm sure you know that, for several years, this page has been used for a discussion of CP in general, and that everyone, including Andy and the other admins, is OK with that. A more natural place for such discussion might have been a general discussion page such as Conservapedia:Desk, but, as you can see, it has rarely been used of late. There is actually a (an?) historical reason, from a few years back, for this. I won't bore everyone with the details, but you can email me if you are interested.

Regarding my "subject matter experts" comment above, I wasn't asking for people who are good at detecting trolls. We already have plenty of people (including myself) who are good at this, and plenty of people (including you) who are good at dealing with them. We probably already have the "Best Troll Detection of the Public". I was requesting "subject matter experts", which we don't really have very many of, or don't know who they are on various topics, and requesting that subject matter expertise be used in deciding whether to revert an edit.

In the case of the molar mass edit, I was well aware that this person might be a troll—his use of the recondite (there's that word again) terms "subjective" and "objective" in a description of quantitative chemical analysis was a bit suspicious—these are quasi-philosophical terms that might be considered provocative on a wiki like this. But he also knew what molar mass means. His change was a vast improvement over the "fuel quantity" phrase. The article just needed to have the "subjective" and "objective" words taken out, which I have done. The person did know his subject matter. There was no urgency in reverting his edit.

A suggestion, Vargas: Let's both try to be nice. You do good work when you're not talking about "withering patrician disdain". We can both do better than fight with each other.

Maybe I should have spent the day shopping instead of this :-) SamHB 00:02, 1 December 2014 (EST)

I will not disregard Andy's express instructions at the top of the page! VargasMilan 16:12, 2 December 2014 (EST)

Fair enough. I will try to abide by that policy also. SamHB 17:11, 6 December 2014 (EST)

I would be interested to hear what Andy thinks of the "subject matter expert" approach. Wikipedia generally hates experts and does everything to drive them away as editors. Many of the early CP articles were written by home-schooled students. We then had Ed Poor spending years curating a large number of articles. A few other editors undertook work in particular areaa of expertise such as AlanE and BHathorn. I suspect that Andy has his own lists of experts in the back of his mind, if not written down. The problem is that everyone believes that they are an expert while management may not agree with that assessment. So, we have to see whether this proposal is compatible with the "best of the public" concept. Thanks for raising it. Wschact 07:16, 7 December 2014 (EST)

Growing Conservapedia's conservative readership and editor base

Now that Conservapedia's Twitter link on the main page, two things:

1. We could organize our wiki editors to create/expand conservative articles in order to feature them on the Twitter feed.

2. Twitter is popular among conservatives. This book shows people how to attract 200 Twitter fans every single day: http://www.amazon.com/Twitter-Followers-Step---Step-guaranteed-ebook/dp/B00KEX694O/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1417623658&sr=8-3&keywords=twitter+marketing The book is only $1.00 and it should be easy to implement. If it was implemented, the Twitter account would go from 10,000 Twitter fans/followers to 83,000 fans/followers in one year.Conservative 11:30, 3 December 2014 (EST)

Make the username policy more clear

Copied on over from Help talk:How To Create a Conservapedia Account

I think it should be made clear that the username must include your real name, as opposed to recommending your real name; perhaps there could be a help page on Conservapedia's username policy. A few users have been blocked for violating an otherwise nonexistent policy (and also advised to create an account with a real name even though their account creation is disabled for two years). A clear username policy would probably be beneficial for Conservapedia. -- DanielJackson 10:46, 6 December 2014 (EST)

Conservative's "Message Area"

I seem to be unable to edit it, despite wanting to discuss something with him. As such I put out a general request for a way to contact him or for him to unlock his message area. Hopefully I'm not missing something really obvious! Nhodgson 20:18, 6 December 2014 (EST)

You would do well to just ignore him. There's really nothing that you could discuss with him. He is notoriously secretive, seeming to believe that other people go along with his games, and he often locks his own talk page, and the talk pages of his "pet" articles. He seems to expect other people to go along with his fantasy that he might be multiple people. Just ignore him. SamHB 21:37, 6 December 2014 (EST)

If we could talk to him, we might tell him that his reversion of this on purely political grounds was ludicrous and shows a serious failure to observe what is going on. That edit was more than just a minor thing about whether Lincoln was a "classical liberal" or a "post New Deal progressive"—it was blatant and outrageous vandalism, about which most admins are very vigilant. The user ("TheonlySIL", whatever that means) should be blocked permanently. Perhaps some other admin will notice. SamHB 21:48, 6 December 2014 (EST)

Setting aside SamHB's axe to grind because I/we are pro-biblical creationism and anti-Darwinism/liberal Christianity, my/our talk page has just been unlocked.

By the way SamHB, what do you think about the data contained in this article: Liberal Christianity and marital infidelity ? Can you refute it? It does not appear so! Conservative 13:00, 7 December 2014 (EST)

Haven't read it. But thanks for unlocking your talk page, Could you keep it that way, please? SamHB 23:52, 11 December 2014 (EST)

SamHB, may lock it again if I/we become extremely busy for an extended period or for other reasons which I/we prefer not to discuss. The talk pages of articles I/we created/contributed can certainly be used. Conservative 01:59, 12 December 2014 (EST)

Message from User: TheAmericanRedoubt

Working copy and backup in case of vandalism.

NOTE to Fellow Editors and Admins: Please note that I am a trained (both in Asia and the USA) and certified professional practitioner / subject matter expert in the field of Complementary medicine / Alternative medicine, particularly Traditional Chinese medicine-Acupuncture, Ayurvedic medicine and nutrition for the last 19 years.

I am a also a life-long gardener who is certified in Permaculture gardening (completed a Permaculture design course (PDC).

Being a "Prepper", Preparedness-Survivalism, permaculture and firearms are two of my main passions/hobbies for many years. As a life-long gun enthusiast / "gun nut", I am a life member of the National Rifle Association and regular supporter of Gun Owners of America, Second Amendment Foundation and Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership along with several other regional Second Amendment defender organizations. Thus, I expect to spend a good amount of time improving, expanding and organizing the firearms articles.

Through the month of December 2014 and January 2015, I am working many hours per week on editing Conservapedia. For specifically on a collapsible "See Also" navigation template for the diverse topics of the Alternative medicine, First aid, Permaculture gardening, Firearms, Emergency preparedness and Amateur radio articles I am also working on and articles on related topics. I am contributing a variety of articles (put into as much summary laymen's terms as I can) on Computer security as well since I worked for 17 years as an network engineer in the computer networking field.

I will also be working on the Categories for all of these Alternative medicine topics and related Healthcare, Cooking and Nutrition categories and items such as spices (which are related to health and nutrition)

So, I please request your patience in considering not deleting articles or content I have submitted in these subject areas without first discussing it on the Talk Page and letting me know on my User Page, if you would be so kind.

Also, please note that I plan to rapidly submit articles for the "red links". Thank you for your patience. TheAmericanRedoubt 22:33, 11 December 2014 (EST)

I put your Prepper material here: User:TheAmericanRedoubt/Prepper. Conservative 10:16, 13 December 2014 (EST)

Purpose of this page

This page provides a forum for editors to discuss matters related to CP and its policies. Please do not use it as a sandbox for drafting article. You can create your own sandbox by making a subpage of your user page. Thanks, Wschact 09:43, 13 December 2014 (EST)

Your right. I was in a hurry before. Haste makes waste. :) Conservative 10:17, 13 December 2014 (EST)

@@ Line 131: / Line 131: @@
 ==Purpose of this page==
 This page provides a forum for editors to discuss matters related to CP and its policies.  Please do not use it as a sandbox for drafting article.  You can create your own sandbox by making a subpage of your user page. Thanks, [[User:Wschact|Wschact]] 09:43, 13 December 2014 (EST)
+:Your right. I was in a hurry before. Haste makes waste. :) [[User:Conservative|Conservative]] 10:17, 13 December 2014 (EST)