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Conservapedia:Community Portal (view source)
Revision as of 20:08, January 4, 2015
, 20:08, January 4, 2015→This Site is Being Hijacked: new section
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== This Site is Being Hijacked ==
There is no more pleasant way to put that.
This is a continuation of what I wrote above about "Do we really have so few responsible editors". The problem is extremely serious. Ultimately, it is about there being so few people who are responsible, level-headed, and able to put reasonable amounts of time into this, that one person can overwhelm everyone and turn Conservapedia into something far removed from its original goal. The original goal, in case people have forgotten, was a site that home-school students (and others, of course) can use as a general reference source, on a wide variety of topics, without bias from the liberals elsewhere on the Internet.
But [[User:TheAmericanRedoubt]] is single-handedly steering the site into a very different and troubling direction. Multiple directions, actually. How is he able to do this? '''Because his editing is fanatical, intense, and obsessive, and there aren't enough level-headed editors around who have the time and energy to put the brakes on.'''
He is turning this into a blog on survivalism, one very particular "Vata/Dosha/Ayurvedic" type of nontraditional medicine, and many other things. There is nothing wrong with articles on these topics, but he is overwhelming Conservapedia with his obsessive editing.
He has put dozens and dozens of references to his views on survivalism into a huge number of articles for which such references are totally inappropriate. He seems to think that we should all drop out of society, cash in everything we have into "tangibles" (bullets, beans, batteries, whatever) and move to "redoubt states" like Idaho to spend the rest of our days behind some barricades doing .... I don't know.
His steering of CP into his chosen direction is made all the worse by his fanatical cross-referencing and categorizing. This has put his writings "in your face" when people go to normal topics. For example:
*[[vibration]] used to be a short article explaining what wibration is—a rapid periodic undulating motion. TAR put it into the "VATA" category. When one looks around in same, one finds some new-age touchy-feely nonsense about psychological perceptions of vibration. He polluted [[Fashion industry values]] in the same way.
*Similar irrelevant edits to [[Empirical science]], [[Natural Law]], [[Scientific observation]], [[Color]], [[Hopelessness]], [[Hearing_(sense)]], and [[Salt]].
*Similar survivalist edits to [[Ruthenium]], [[Transformer]] (the electrical device), and [[Wire]] (the electrical conductor).
*He has written extensively about [[amateur radio]], which, as an extra-class licensed ham, I think is fine. But the implication is that hams are just supposed to do this so they can communicate with each other "off the grid" in their "redoubts". I can assure everyone that the vast majority of hams (even those in call sign area 7) are fully engaged in society. We take emergency preparedness very seriously, of course, and have a big annual contest on this topic every year, but this is always done in cooperation with existing local, state, and federal emergency organizations. We have sub-organizations (ARES and RACES) dealing with this. We are very much on the grid and in society, and I object to the implication that we are not.
*His [[IP camera]] article, to pick just one of dozens of examples, links to [[Survivalist retreat]]. This is absurd.
In addition to his fanatical edits to Conservapedia articles that, by themselves, materially alter this site's direction, this huge web of interconnected categories and "see also"s makes it impossible for readers to escape his actions. This is significantly worse than what [[User:Conservative]] has been doing because, in the latter case, one simply needs to ignore any article with "hot button" phrases like "obesity", "evolutionism", "creationism", "atheism", "ponies", "walrus slides", and "long-haired creationist ladies". It's much much harder to escape from [[User:TheAmericanRedoubt]]'s behavior.
I urge the administrators to put a stop to this. The rest of us simply can't do it.
[[User:SamHB|SamHB]] 15:08, 4 January 2015 (EST)