User:Jazzman831/leaving

Why I can No Longer Edit at Conservapedia

An essay, by me.

Preface

For starters, I should say that (despite declarations in the contrary from people who are only trying to push me away), I truly want Conservapedia to succeed. I support the goals of a family-friendly, America-centric, Christian, conservative encyclopedia. I'm just tired of fighting with people who don't seem to want to follow their own rules or make their own encyclopedia presentable to other conservatives.

Part 1: The Rules

As written, I have no problem with any of the rules of Conservapedia. I think they were well-designed an well-intentioned. However in practice, the rules are bent, and more often broken, in a way to support a false or unsupportable message, and to quelsh dissenting opinion.

90/10

Let's face it, the 90/10 rule is probably the most-often abused rule on Conservapedia. It is often used "in spirit" when someone is saying something an administrator doesn't like. It then becomes impossible to claim that someone was blocked for ideological reasons, when the administrator can simply say they were violating the spirit of 90/10.

In theory I have no problem with the 90/10 rule. If Conservapedia decides it doesn't want to be a debate site, so be it. If they decide that they only want productive editors spending large amounts of time hammering out issues on talk pages, they will probably be much better off for it. But as long as 90/10 is abused, it only decreases the overall efficiency of the site, and brings it down.

The Commandments

My problem with the Commandments aren't that they are being abused, but that they are flagrantly violated. The number of times I was called a liberal and other vile names simply for suggesting that someone follow the Commandments speaks volumes about administrators' (and let's face it, parodists') true desire to create a reputable site.

Another problem with the Commandments has to do with sourcing. If you try hard enough, you can find someone on the internet who has said something that agrees with you, but that does not mean that they are correct. Time and time again a statement has been backed up by some crank or worse, a blog or even worse, a comment on a blog, and passed off as a valid citation. Then on the other end of the spectrum, highly scrutinized (albeit liberally biased) sources such as the New York Times are ignored out of hand if they disagree with the point being made. A statement (and therefore and article, and therefore an encycopledia) is only as good as the sources that back it up.

While we are on sources, a list of examples does not prove a trend. This is something I have been fighting for months, if not over a year. If you say "Liberals to X more than conservatives do", you can not back this statement up with a list of 10 or 100 or 1,000 examples of liberals doing X. Period. The only way a list could possibly prove a trend is if you list every single example and every single counter example.

Naming Conventions

This is just a stupid rule. It's not high up on my list of problems, but it's enforced arbitrarily and more often than not in order to intimidate and harrass.

Note that it's not actually a rule, but a guideline; to block people for violating it is just plain silly and petty. Many people won't feel comfortable editing a site they know nothing about with their real name (even if it isn't explicit), and Conservapedia loses potential good editors by enforcing this guideline. Additionally, for me it is hard to keep straight names if they are all "MarkA" and "MarkB". Even now I have to think a second to remember who DeanS and HenryS are (they are, of course, Crocoite and Bohdan, names much easier to keep straight and establish an identity to).

Part 2: Parodists and Trolls

As a strident enforcer of the rules, as time went on I felt like I was playing a game of Whack-A-Mole, but the game was cheating. There are simply too many parodists and trolls on Conservapedia. What's the point of fixing one article if three more pop up in the mean time?

Bugler

The big question is (well, the big question was; he's all but answered this now): Is Bugler a parodist?

I say, why does it matter? He called Tim an idiot (numerous times), he's told Philip to commit metaphorical wiki-suicide, and has called me numerous names. He doesn't follow the rules, he bans without reason, he antagonizes good faith editors and is generally a detriment to the site. He should have been banned a long time ago, but no admin is man enough to stand up to him and just block him already. Even if we suppose that he's a legitimate editor (and there's serious doubt about this), he should be banned simply for his other actions.

Worse than his actual actions, are the blantant willful ignorance or even defence of Bugler by administrators. <add more>

TK

TK is not a parodist, but he is lying about his convictions. He sows dissent, bullies other users and is generally a mean-spirited person. He tells people one thing in private, and another in public. He has said, in private, that he hates Andy, thinks Andy is a drunk, and that he wants to convince Andy to shut down the site to outsiders, thus garunteeing that it is brought down from within. Is this the kind of editor (or sysop!!) that CP needs?

Others

RodWeathers is a very obvious parodist, but for the most part has refrained from bullying others. (However he just got block rights, so that might change). QWest is either a parodist or a bigot, though he doesn't edit very often, and rarely on the mainspace. BHarlan is also either a parodist or a bigot. Most of his articles are so outlandish that there is no way to fix them without outright deleting them.

Jpatt might be a parodist, but he mostly is inoffensive (though he has trouble with the English language at times). He has had some seriously flawed articles, and he's starting to test the limits of his power (he will soon find out that there are very few; I fear he may turn into another Bugler soon).

Foxtrot says some outlandish things, but I'm not convinced he's a parodist. Unlike other parodists (*cough* Bugler! *cough*) he works well with others, especially when they present valid evidence. While I disagree with much that he writes, if every editor were like Foxtrot, CP could conceivably survive. (Well, you'd also need an equal number of editors like me.) That being said, there are some things that just make me wonder

Part 3: Sysops

I don't have nearly as much trouble with the sysops as the RWers seem to, but there are some definite liabilities within the sysopship of Conservapedia.

Ed Poor

Six months ago, I had no major problems with Ed. He made some junk articles, but not many, and most of them were at least salvagable. Then he left.

Since he came back, it's almost as if he is an entirely different person. He's "live blogging" movies, adding lots of trivial and irrelevant information, while at the same time, deleting perfectly valid information and even articles. He's creating article after article about homosexual topics, and they are almost all junk. Many of his articles were based on one dubious source, which claims that a single Nazi raped 100 boys every day. He's creating completely useless and unformatted stubs by the barrelful -- and he's supposed to have been a senior editor and administrator at Wikipedia!

He blocks users without abandon (and won't respond to their emails; I personally recieved emails from at least 3 different users who asked me to interviene because Ed ignored them), deletes talk page comments for blatantly false reasons, and is generally an ass for no apparent reason. He is blindly defending and protecting TK and Bugler (though he at least finally told Bugler to cool it).

Conservative

I don't think Conservative has ever been an asset to Conservapedia. He has at least stopped creating new articles, but all of the articles he have written are protected, so nobody else can change them. Now he has decided to devote all of his energy to promoting Conservapedia, which would be OK if he did not do so in detriment to the site. He finds dubious reasons to add pictures of Hitler to unrelated pages, because he thinks it makes more people read the article. While it might drive more traffic to the page (largely from people looking to see if something so outrageuously stupid is true), there's no evidence that people are actually reading, let alone taking seriously and being convinced by, his articles.

Conservative has also created articles about completely non-notable blogs, in some sort of link-exchanging scheme. When it was shown that six of these blogs were written by the exact same person, Conservative dissappeared and did not delete the articles like he should have.

(Oh, did I mention the time that he decided to completely ignore everything I wrote?)

TK

What else needs to be said? When TK was a sysop he was the same as he is now, only many many times worse.

No other sysop will stand up to TK, and he has been given free reign to do whatever he pleases.

Part 4: Andy Shlafly

It has to be said. He may have started the site, but he is not the best person to be leading the site. He never admits when he's wrong, he ignores problems and he only supports people who agrees with him. He is an incredibly illogical person, and refuses to believe anything that goes against what he thinks he already knows. Worst of all, after creating a site which is supposed to be from a conservative perspective, he barely understands the definition of "conservative", refuses to understand that "conservative" can mean different things in different contexts and completely doesn't understand the definition of liberal. He doesn't know why he believes what he does, just that he believes them, and as such, he can't back them up. Instead of trying to change minds, he has given up on every single person who doesn't fall 100% in line with him.

What the heck? How can you possibly rectify this with this? How do you rectify this with this? What is going on around here?