Conservapedia talk:Ask questions

(1) Did you know that the Login/Create Account button does not allow anyone to create an account? This looks very unprofessional and should be corrected as quickly as possible.

(2) It seems to me that this site is properly described as a "fundamentalist Protestant Christian conservative" site, rather than as a general "conservative" site. I have noticed a number of things asserted as fact with which I am sure a very large number of self-described conservatives would disagree.

Of course, one could always have a semantic, and sterile, argument about who is "really" a conservative, so let me put this assertion as a testable proposition: if we gathered together the editorial boards of the American journals calling themselves conservative (such as Modern Age, National Review, Weekly Standard, American Conservative, Chronicles, Claremont Review, to name some of the most prominent) I am confident that the overwhelming majority of the editors would disagree strongly with such (astonishing) statements as "there is no evidence for the existence of human civilizations earlier than about 3500 BC."

In the interests of political clarity, the particular kind of conservatism espoused here should be made clear.

Consider how you would feel if a group of atheist homosexual conservatives (and there are people who are homosexual atheists who call themselves conservative, and are sincere about it) were to start a "Conservative Encyclopedia" site, claiming it to be representative of conservatism in general, and put in entries such as "Conservatives are strongly for the institution of marriage, and wish to see it extended to embrace gay couples as well as straight." This would be out of order, I would think. But if they said, "Atheist Homosexual Conservatives are strongly for ..." etc then that would be a simple statement of fact, although you might well object that atheists and homosexuals should not be called conservatives regardless of their other beliefs -- but that is a different issue. What is for sure is that they would be wrong to claim their beliefs as representative of all self-described conservatives).

MediaWiki software questions

Hello! I just joined Conservapedia today (thanks, Andy!). The first thing I tried to do was to create some templates, in preparation for "porting" an article of mine from CreationWiki on the life of Joseph. And immediately I ran into some difficulties.

1. The template processor/interpreter cannot handle "if" statements. I created a template on CreationWiki for establishing an instant external link to Bible Gateway with any passage of the Bible, in any version. I tried to "port" it here. But when I did, the "if" statements were handled as text, not as conditional statements. I had to revise my template to make all my parameters required, instead of having defaults--and one parameter (language) I had to eliminate entirely.
2. No redirects! Sooner or later you're going to have articles with more than one possible name. That's what redirects are for. Redirects should be available as a special "redirect key" in every Edit window. Does redirection even work on this project? It should--it's invaluable. (Of course, I realize that redirection can go only one step before it breaks.)
3. No tables! Actually, I suspect that if I laid out a table, using the vertical bars, it would probably reproduce as I wanted it to. But you ought to have the Table button enabled for editing, so that someone creating a new page can get an instant table to see how to lay one out.
4. Has anyone built any templates at all? I could not find any in the Template namespace.

I took the liberty of creating a new practice page that any editor can use to try things out. This is the rough equivalent of the "sandbox" on Wikipedia. Have a look at my two new templates! Except that with "if" statements, they could be so much better--defaulting to the whole chapter, defaulting to the KJV (or the NASB, or ASV, or whichever you prefer), and so on.

Let me know what would be required to write templates with conditionals, and about redirects, and so on.--TerryH 20:48, 5 March 2007 (EST)