Conservapedia:Newcomer's Guide

	Trus me; Conservapedia
	Introduction
	Newcomer's Guide; What is going on?;
	Commentary
	Best of Conservapedia; Blatant plagiarism; Differences with Wikipedia; Hijacked articles; "SDG"; "TZB"; "Fab Five"; Sysops; Timeline; CP in the media;
	In-depth analysis
	Active users; Illustrated guide;
	Fun
	Article Matrix; Greatest Insights; Parthian Shots; v - t - e

This Conservapedia-related article is of largely historical interest and is no longer the focus of RationalWiki today.
Conservapedia (and religious fundamentalism to an extent) was a major focal point in the early history of RationalWiki, but long ago ceased coming up with new ways to appall and amuse.
Our energies are now spent debunking other, fresher examples of pseudoscientific claims, authoritarianism, and deceit.
For RationalWiki's less ancient content, try the Best of RationalWiki.

This guide is intended to provide new RationalWiki users with basic information about Conservapedia, its modus operandi, and to clarify your relationship with regard to this seminal work of Western society. Be forewarned that this guide is written from the non-conservative perspective, so if creationism is your bag, baby, the following may not be a "friendly" guide, but will give you the general idea.

Introduction[edit]

Conservapedia is often billed as the Religious Right's Wikipedia. In reality it is nothing of the sort. It started out as a project for homeschooled children and became overrun by people who saw it as a place to further their own agendas, and people who opposed these agendas. A large proportion of those active at any given time are parodists, people pretending to agree with the site's ideology for their own and readers' amusement. The result is that today it is a disorganised political blog with a few dictionary entries. Any absurdities you might find there may or may not have been sincerely meant by their authors.

Dramatis personæ[edit]

Andrew Schlafly[edit]

The owner and the person with ultimate control over the site.

The administrators[edit]

These are the people chosen by Schlafly to manage the site. Most of them are unimportant and inactive, usually former and current students of Schlafly's homeschooling courses. Those that aren't, are Republican white males over 40; these are the ones you will notice around the most. They are, by and large, people who are not wanted anywhere else and attribute this to discrimination based on their beliefs rather than their behaviour. They are basically bullies with chips on their shoulders who relish the power that they have been given. Keep in mind that even the upper ranks have included a few parodists. Most of the significant sysops have a separate article you can read about them:

Conservative aka. Kenneth "Ken" David DeMyer, Peter Moore, Kenservative, Kdbuffalo, RuyLopez, Kenny Baby, Kenny Boy, The Kenster, Ken, VacuousPoet, Newton, User:GiuocoPiano
Karajou
Ed Poor, aka: Uncle Ed, Smeg Ed, User 188, 188, variations of Moonie
TerryH
Joaquín Martínez

CPWebmaster[edit]

Not a hugely significant person, but most people don't realise Andy doesn't do any of the tech work. When the site goes tits up it is this guy's fault. Most likely a former student of Andy's.

Old legends[edit]

Several former Conservapedians live on in folklore and are occasionally referenced on WIGO and WIGO talk.

TK: One of Andy's most active cronies, blocked everything and everyone in sight almost strangling the site. He has since been confirmed to have shuffled off his mortal coil.
PJR: Long time sysop who left to start his own wikiblog.
RobSmith: Long term paranoid and crony, that for reasons still unclear, tried to challenge the rising power of Conservative. Hanged around RationalWiki occasionally bemoaning the fact he got bitten by the beast he helped create until his ban in 2021. Unblocked in 2015 by Conservative and remains active on both sites.
DeanS: Used to maintain the mainpage, has not been seen since his wife died.
CollegeRepublican: Received sysop rights after 1 minute, only ever made ~~two~~ three edits.

Notable parodists[edit]

Socks who made enough of an impact to shift the long term policy of the site.

MexMax: After being given block rights, blocked the entire site. People who imitate this are referred to as having gone MexMax.
Bugler: Long term parodist who caused a lot of problems.
RodWeathers: Bugler's tag-team partner.
JessicaT: The first parodist to get accepted into Schlafly's circle, after getting booted out released email discussions of the sysops. Psygremlin still talks about "her" in third person.

Minor players[edit]

Neither one nor the other, but show up regularly:

Jinxmchue
Roger Schlafly: Andy's older brother, an infrequent editor who tries to restore some sense into Andy's ravings about relativity

Next generation[edit]

Folks that filled in the void in the Tea Party/Trump era:

Northwest: mean POV-warrior.
DavidB4: nice college kid who is sincere.
TheAmericanRedoubt: sick refugee from WP who tried to convert CP into a spam farm for his friends in Idaho. Has since left as of April 2016.
1990'sguy: came from WP andCreationWiki, and is obsessed with cp:Donald Trump achievements and the cp:War on Sovereignty.
YortKeldher: Russian conservative with much English difficulty.

Conservapedia concepts[edit]

Over the years many events on Conservapedia have lead to the creation of words unique to, or have a meaning unique to, Conservapedia. They are very "in jokey" and a new user may find some of them rather difficult to understand. Some of the most common are:

A search engine starting with G: Google. Often used as meme where G is replaced with some other random letter.
Conservapedia Terms: Aschlafly regularly makes up new phrases to describe people or groups he doesn't like, which is frankly just about everybody. Not only are the terms completely unencyclopedic, as they originate in the mainspace of Conservapedia without having been referenced anywhere in the real world previously, they are also a great source of laughs. When Aschflaly unveils another term, most dedicated Conservapedians will fall over themselves to add new examples to the article, and a race ensues as to who will add it to WIGO first. A useful table has been compiled here to track some of the Conservapedia terms.
Conservative words: A series of handpicked words that display "a remarkable geometric growth".
Deceit: Aschlafly is convinced that only liberals are capable of deceit: they are the only humans in the history of time that have ever lied. The definition is narrowed & widened at will to suit challenges to this, errr, "worldview." Many RationalWiki users will refer to "deceit" by hyperlinking to the Conservapedia article, just to have a good laugh. As such, deceit has become synonymous with overzealous persecution of liberals, and paranoid ramblings.
The FBI: An event that caused great embarrassment to Conservapedia when Andy pretended to report a vandal to the FBI, presumably to look cool. You can be banned for mentioning or alluding to it.
Gentlemen: A series of open letters that contained rather cryptic and inexact wording written by Conservative (the sysop) addressed to the "Gentlemen at a rather liberal wiki" or something similar, vis-à-vis RationalWiki. They often foretold of events that "may or may not" occur in the not too distant future "regarding" how far up a search engine results page an article on Conservapedia would be at "a search engine starting with G". These events that would affect the webpage ranking were termed "Operation"; often given silly names such as "Operation Grassroots". These operations ultimately turned out to be reciprocal linking with small time bloggers.
Guard dog: A now defunct piece of software written by PJR that used to patrol the recent changes log. It was put down after it bit the hand that fed it (and PJR was no longer around to update it).
Homeschooling Homeschooling is by far and away the best possible means for educating children, demonstrated by some of the finest minds ever produced being homeschooled. Ignoring the fact that most humans haven't lived in societies where public schools existed, Aschlafly also manipulates the data to prove his point by using a broad enough definition of homeschooling that practically anyone could qualify. By that definition, any formative influence at home counts as "schooling," and only an orphan without human contact outside of school could avoid being homeschooled to some degree.
Lenski: n,v Richard Lenski is a somewhat famous microbiologist whose long running E. coli experiments proved an important theory on the mechanisms of evolution. Schlafly sent him two letters demanding he release to Schlafly his data and in reply he received a written smackdown. One may be "Lenskied", a far more intellectual version of "pwnage".
Liberal: in Conservapedia lexicon, a "liberal" is anyone who is not a young-earth creationist. Even Reagan Republicans are liberals.
Machismo: Not being a liberal panty-waister.
Night editing: Only administrators and people in the "edit" group may edit between roughly midnight to 7 am on the server clock. If you can not edit at all and have not been blocked it is because night editing is on.
Open mindedness: In the parallel universe of Conservapedia to "open ones mind" means to agree with Schlafly. If you are ever in a disagreement with the administration they will request that you open your mind and you will naturally see straight away that they are right about everything.
Trusworthy: An accidental misspelling of trustworthy that appeared in the site's logo for several days.

Why not visit our DysLexicon?

Notes on editing Conservapedia[edit]

Before you can actually edit Conservapedia, you need to create an account. Even then, new editors are not safe, for a single edit made from an IP address that has already been used by a blocked editor, will result in an immediate ban.

Because of the threat of severe and serial "vandalism" at Conservapedia and the lack of "trusworthy" Conservapedia administrators, all Conservapedia pages are locked from editing at certain hours of the day so that "unorthodox" and other "unproductive" material can be removed. In addition, articles on sensitive topics such as evolution are protected from editing on an almost continual basis. Unregistered users are not permitted to edit any page.

Despite the threat of legal action (and possibly ten years imprisonment if convicted) against editors who are caught "vandalising" Conservapedia, ~~it should be noted that establishing a user account via an open proxy is generally permitted on Conservapedia~~ it is often possible to edit via an open proxy for a short period of time. Karajou, Jallen and TK have been known to use Checkuser to ban users en masse and some efforts have been made to identify open proxies when certain users have been banned. See How to use proxies. This is in contrast to Wikipedia, where account creation from known open proxies is prevented by technical means.

The threat of blocking hangs heavily over editors at Conservapedia, and blocks are used (often without warning) not only for vandalism and violating the dreaded 90/10 rule, but often for inserting balanced material into articles, disagreeing with a sysop or pointing out how ridiculous their opinions are. Sysop comments often imply that they expect all editors, including new users, to know the pecking order, be aware of who has blocking powers and avoid entering a dispute with them.

Conservapedia fun[edit]

The following are various examples of fun and snark directed at Conservapedia and Conservapedians