Favouring YEC
"First, they know full well that a majority of the senior editors are YECs, and that articles that treat the evolutionary view as fact will not be allowed to remain in that state." The Commandments say nothing about favouring YECism. There's no list of senior editors, nor any indication that the opinions of such a class of users should have greater weight. If it is the policy of Conservapedia that YEC views should have priority then it should be stated explicitly, if only so that editors who make good faith edits from the perspective of mainstream science are not misled into wasting their time here. I know that your criticism was intended for particular individuals, but it was addressed to evolutionists in general and this is a public wiki; If Conservapedia continues to grow then you're going to frustrate a lot of new users who won't know that some aspects of mainstream science are frowned upon here. --Jalapeno 13:35, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
- Not only dot the Commandments say nothing about favouring YEC, neither did I. I was saying that favouring evolutionary views would not be allowed. It is a common characteristic of anti-creationists that evolutionary views are considered the "right" view and anything that even questions this is unacceptable. Thus we have many Wikipedia editors arguing that the evolutionary view is the "neutral" view, and we have you assuming that if evolution is not favoured, that must mean that YEC is.
- My implicit assumption is that Conservapedia intends to be truly neutral on this, favouring neither YEC nor evolution.
- Granted that my reference to senior editors was ambiguous; I guess that I was referring mainly to the sysops, but didn't want to limit exactly to that group.
- My criticism was not intended for particular individuals, but for evolutionists in general, although being a generalisation, I'm not claiming it applies to all evolutionists, some are better than others.
- Philip J. Rayment 22:06, 15 May 2007 (EDT)
- That's fair enough Philip. What I mean by "favouring YECism" is that "Conservapedia gives greater weight to YEC views, and less weight to evolutionary views than a new user who reads the Conservapedia Commandments could reasonably expect". Of course Conservapedia is entitled to give greater weight to YECism and less weight to evolutionism than is usual for a mainstream encyclopaedia, but it should be explicitly stated as a rule or policy. This is not particularly about Wikipedia -- Encarta, Brittanica, etc. all give little or no weight to YEC views in scientific articles -- it's about Conservapedia, a public wiki that invites contributions in line with the Conservapedia Commandments, being fair to users who make contributions in good faith only to find them discarded as a result of an unwritten rule that they can't reasonably be expected to know about in advance. --Jalapeno 03:11, 16 May 2007 (EDT)