Bronze-level articleA Storehouse of Knowledge

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</choose>  is an open editing<ref>N.B. editing is currently limited to politely agreeing with anything published by [[CMI]], which for handy reference is included in the back of the ''Literalist Bible'' handed out at the door (your bank account will be debited).</ref>, [[punk|punk rock]] and ska<ref>[http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Punk_rock We kid] [http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Ska_punk you not].</ref> encyclopædia written from a Biblical point of view, in Australian English.<ref>[http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&diff=prev&oldid=311 PJR whips out his MacQuarie dictionary.]</ref> It is the brainchild of [[Conservapedia:Sysops/Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]], and represents the second major splinter from [[Conservapedia]] (after [[RationalWiki]]);<ref>No one counts [[Liberapedia]], since it is lame.</ref> Conservapedia itself being a reaction to [[Wikipedia]].
 
</choose>  is an open editing<ref>N.B. editing is currently limited to politely agreeing with anything published by [[CMI]], which for handy reference is included in the back of the ''Literalist Bible'' handed out at the door (your bank account will be debited).</ref>, [[punk|punk rock]] and ska<ref>[http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Punk_rock We kid] [http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Ska_punk you not].</ref> encyclopædia written from a Biblical point of view, in Australian English.<ref>[http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/index.php?title=Talk:Main_Page&diff=prev&oldid=311 PJR whips out his MacQuarie dictionary.]</ref> It is the brainchild of [[Conservapedia:Sysops/Philip J. Rayment|Philip J. Rayment]], and represents the second major splinter from [[Conservapedia]] (after [[RationalWiki]]);<ref>No one counts [[Liberapedia]], since it is lame.</ref> Conservapedia itself being a reaction to [[Wikipedia]].
  
ASK is aimed at misrepresenting a number of fields of science, history, law, linguistics, and philosophy to conform to PJR's particular "literal" interpretation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, PJR and his aSK pals will favor a creationist source over anything they can characterize as in any way antagonistic to creationism, no matter how false or unsupported the creationist source's claims are. It's difficult to know whether PJR is simply a bald-faced liar or truly believes in the positions he advocates. Nonetheless, if you're interested in debating creationists on  topics such as whether dinosaurs lived alongside human beings or whether "atheistic evolutionists" have an absolute basis for morality like those goody-goody Christians, aSK is for you. Curiously, many RationalWiki <s>masochists</s> editors have signed up on the site.
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ASK is aimed at misrepresenting a number of fields of [[science]], [[history]], [[law]], [[linguistics]], and [[philosophy]] to conform to PJR's particular [[biblical literalism  |"literal" interpretation]] of the [[Bible]]. Unsurprisingly, PJR and his aSK pals will favor a [[creationist]] source over anything they can characterize as in any way antagonistic to creationism, no matter how false or unsupported the creationist source's claims are. It's difficult to know whether PJR is simply a bald-faced liar or truly believes in the positions he advocates. Nonetheless, if you're interested in debating creationists on  topics such as whether [[dinosaurs]] lived alongside human beings or whether "atheistic evolutionists" have an absolute basis for morality like those goody-goody [[Christians]], aSK is for you. Curiously, many RationalWiki <s>masochists</s> editors have signed up on the site.
  
 
==Hierarchy==
 
==Hierarchy==

Revision as of 18:31, 1 February 2011

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A Storehouse of Knowledge (also known as aSK SKA) is an open editing[1], punk rock and ska[2] encyclopædia written from a Biblical point of view, in Australian English.[3] It is the brainchild of Philip J. Rayment, and represents the second major splinter from Conservapedia (after RationalWiki);[4] Conservapedia itself being a reaction to Wikipedia.

ASK is aimed at misrepresenting a number of fields of science, history, law, linguistics, and philosophy to conform to PJR's particular "literal" interpretation of the Bible. Unsurprisingly, PJR and his aSK pals will favor a creationist source over anything they can characterize as in any way antagonistic to creationism, no matter how false or unsupported the creationist source's claims are. It's difficult to know whether PJR is simply a bald-faced liar or truly believes in the positions he advocates. Nonetheless, if you're interested in debating creationists on topics such as whether dinosaurs lived alongside human beings or whether "atheistic evolutionists" have an absolute basis for morality like those goody-goody Christians, aSK is for you. Curiously, many RationalWiki masochists editors have signed up on the site.

Contents

Hierarchy

The hierarchy at ASK is not well established yet, but if the user rights groups are anything to go by it is going to be almost as tightly managed as RationalWikiWiki.[5]

In theory (used colloquially) the ranks from top to bottom, based on the number of rights:

  • Bureaucrat
  • Administrator
  • Umpire[6]
  • Senior_member
  • Member
  • Autoconfirmed users
  • Users

In practice, the hierarchy is:

  • Philip J. Rayment, closely followed by
  • Bradley
  • various B-list creationists
  • Everyone else (which is to say no one else, as there are pretty much no other editors)

In keeping with the Conservapedia tradition of making editing as hard as possible, one must obtain the rank of member before one can upload images. An editor can move the subpages of their userpage, which is novel. Senior members can delete pages with less than two revisions and can participate in certain votes and committees.

In a display of some reasonable foresight, the ability to delete and restore page histories belongs only to bureaucrats.

To avoid any unpleasant tinge of democracy and to avoid any unbiblical worldviews leaking in to the upper echelons, members are elected to a higher rank by a vote of their seniors rather than their peers, or by being "known to management" (colloq. nepotism.) This is a wonderful mechanism for aSoK to develop its very own cabal.

Blocking

  • A parodist was the first person to be blocked. Initially blocked for a day, the block was increased to infinite and then reduced to one year, presumably as policy decisions were made on the fly.
  • Block log at ASK

Copyright

Copyright terms at ASK have been controversial and the subject of debate. The terms originally stated that all content was the property of the site - effectively requiring editors to assign their copyrights over to ASK.[7] After some debate, and some warnings that vague and oppressive terms would stifle the growth of the site, modifed terms were introduced - apparently in an attempt to assuage such concerns. This has not been entirely successful.

This is a major difference with projects like the Wikimedia Project, including Wikipedia, as well as many other unrelated wikis, including RationalWiki, where contributors retain the copyright to their own work, and content is released under a free license (e.g. GNU FDL and/or some Creative Commons licenses[8]) that irrevocably allows copying and derivative works, including for commercial purposes.[9]

This policy has significant long-term consequences. The site owner is the only person who can legally make decisions about content usage. He could for example decide to commercialize the project, turn it into a subscription site, or even shut it down completely. The community would have no means to oppose such decisions. Compare this to Wikipedia, whose content will always remain freely usable due to the irrevocable nature of the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, even if the main site should ever be shut down.

ASK later modified its policies to allow users to maintain control of their contributions, while granting ASK a license to reproduce and use the material for non-profit purposes. Anyone wishing to reproduce ASK content must seek permission from either ASK or the author(s). This is problematic for three reasons. Firstly, ASK may arbitrarily refuse to grant permission for re-use. Anyone wishing to take the route of contacting the author(s) must perform a forensic analysis of the content in order to determine which authors hold the copyright for the content in question - this can be very tedious in the case of articles with long histories. This isn't just a problem for sites external to ASK. This is also a problem for editors at ASK. In theory, an ASK editor wishing to re-use content from an existing article must seek permission from ASK or the individual copyright holders, since ASKs terms allow users to edit content without permission, but not reproduce it.[10]

The moral of the story is that people with no professional or personal experience in intellectual property laws should not attempt to write licenses and copyright terms. Even those with the necessary experience and knowledge would require a pretty good reason to not use any of the existing content licenses in circulation. There are already plenty of well-supported licences, such as GNU and Creative Commons licences, and errors in a licence can be difficult to fix when modification could require relicensing of content from multiple copyright holders.[11] Luckily for ASK, they only have 1,615 content articles.[12] If they should decide to choose a more sensible license it will hopefully not take too long to contact all of their authors.

Paradox?

One of the first extensions added to the site was Semantic Mediawiki. Despite this, much discussion has revolved around semantics, particularly the meaning of "information", the meaning of "evidence" and even the meaning of "meaning".

Gish gallop

PJR makes extensive use of the Gish gallop. Every comment from non-creationists is torn apart into its tiniest morsels of meaning. These are then displayed in the noxious pleasant green typeface of the "tq" template and analysed to death without any attempt to answer the overall gist.

See also

External links

Footnotes

  1. N.B. editing is currently limited to politely agreeing with anything published by CMI, which for handy reference is included in the back of the Literalist Bible handed out at the door (your bank account will be debited).
  2. We kid you not.
  3. PJR whips out his MacQuarie dictionary.
  4. No one counts Liberapedia, since it is lame.
  5. http://www.astorehouseofknowledge.info/Special:ListGroupRights
  6. The only rights an Umpires has above a normal editor is block rights, so it would appear to be rank below Member. However, PJR has only given this right to a subset of the Senior Members, so it would appear to be a hierarchical position.
  7. ASK's original copyright terms
  8. Note that there are Creative Commons licenses that forbid commercial use and/or modification; however the license is still irrevocable; the former just restricts use of the work to non-commercial use and the latter allows free or non-commercial (depending on the licenses) distribution of verbatim copies.
  9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright
  10. ASK Copyrights Accessed 24 November 2009
  11. Wikipedia has an article on license proliferation, which while more focussed on software licensing, is still applicable to the problem that the proliferation of licenses - no matter how well meant, is problematic.
  12. Figure accurate as of 21 August 2010.


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