Conservapedia talk:Commandments

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Andy Schlafly approved the uncited template being mentioned in the conservapedia commandments in a personal email to me.

Here is what I added:

In addition, Conservapedia's Manual of Style shows new Conservapedia wiki users how to flag an article or section of an article which is uncited.

Conservative 19:36, 29 July 2007 (EDT)

Please expand on the meaning of "verifiable"

I've encountered many editors who permit references to the bible. While faith is fine, a lot of the bible is unverified. For example, Jesus may have existed however it cannot be verified that he was the son of god.

Furthermore, the article on god claims "God exercises eternal and righteous judgment of the wicked in hell, because of an inherent problem in the human heart, namely Sin." After asking the editor for verifiable evidence of this he claimed the bible was a reliable source.

If verifiable is defined to include biblical references, so be it. If this is the case a commandment should be made specifying which texts are deemed to be truth and not, as this will resolve much debate.

Otherwise commandment #1 should be greatly expanded because observations made from the bible are quite simply not verifiable and many editors seem to believe they are. I should point out this is not an anti-christian statement, this is just not-pro-christian and nothing in the commandments claim this is a christian encyclopedia.Qc 22:20, 17 March 2008 (EDT)

Whilst not a direct answer to your question, you might find that my Essay: Accuracy vs. neutrality on Conservapedia goes a fair way towards answering that.

There's no point in trying to list all reliable sources, and not much point in just listing a handful. So there's no need for a commandment on this.

This is not an official response; just my opinion. Others might see things differently.

Philip J. Rayment 04:38, 18 March 2008 (EDT)

"It is therefore unreasonable to say that God's existence cannot be proved. God's existence indeed can be proved, depending on what evidence it takes to convince one. "

This quote from your article illustrates my point exactly. Conservapedia needs to set a standard for what constitutes valid "convincing" because every user is going to have their own personal threshold for accepting evidence. Saying evidence must be "verifiable" isn't enough because most editors don't even have an agreed upon definition of this term. Qc 14:05, 18 March 2008 (EDT)

Two questions

I have two questions that I've been wondering about lately. First: what are our (and should we have) guidelines on notability? It seems like we have no real way to judge what should be in the encyclopedia. (For instance, somewhere around here, and I wish I could remember the name now, there's an article about a high school band.) I know we don't like many rules, but guidelines would be very helpful. Suggestions?

Next: do we (and should we) have rules on conflict of interest? I think largely you know best about yourself, so it would be wrong to completely ban conflict of interest cases. But how do we know when something has gone too far, or when someone is censoring information about themselves?

I don't know if these will or should go on the commandments, but this is probably as good a place as any to discuss. HelpJazz 23:16, 17 March 2008 (EDT)

Notability is a very difficult one, in my opinion. I saw some of the debates on that on Wikipedia a couple of years ago. There was something there about not doing an article on every school, just "notable" ones. But then another of their guidelines on notability had to do with whether or not a book had been published on the topic. It wouldn't surprise me to find that many schools have had books published about them (certainly my primary school has, and probably my high school also, and the primary school in particular was only significant in a local sense).

Railway stations were another area of contention; probably not too many railway stations have had a book published specifically about them, but there's certainly plenty of books that give individual histories of each railway station. In a sense, you could define "notable" as anything that more than x number of people would be interested in looking up to find out more about it. But then there's not too much that would be off limits. And with an electronic encyclopedia where space is not that much of an issue, why not?

But I can also appreciate an opposing view that we don't want to much trivia and articles on insignificant topics. It's very hard to know where to draw the line.

We've said before that the best people to write articles are those that know most about them, and I don't see a problem with people writing about things close to themselves. However, what I would suggest is that if we are writing about something that we have a financial interest in, or about a person we are related to, etc. (again, it's hard to know where to draw the line), then we should declare our connection, i.e. make it known what our relationship to the topic (person, etc.) is. This will allow others, who of course can also edit the same articles, to judge whether or not we are being less than objective in our edits. That's a reason for using our real names too, of course!

Philip J. Rayment 05:47, 18 March 2008 (EDT)

I hadn't thought about that with notability. Seems like there probably isn't a good way to have specific guidelines, they must be kept general.

That's a very good idea on COI as well. Perhaps someone could create a template (along the same vein as {{copied from}}) to warn others of a potential conflict. It would obviously have to be on an honor system.

Hey, Help Jazz is my real name! My parents were famous jazz musicians and they named me when they were worried about the death of jazz as a genre... or something like that ;-) HelpJazz 16:14, 18 March 2008 (EDT)