Conservapaedia (sic)

I thought you might be interested in a new wiki project to correct the anti-christian and anti-american bias of wikipedia. for example they have a list of biases in Wikipedia. Here's number one

"1 Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception."

How right they are. I don't know if you've read an academic book on ancient history or archeology recently but they do it too! The whole world isn't utterly compliant with fundaligionist christians. This must be fixed immediately and wikipedia is unworkable with.

The anti-american bias of Wikipedia, and the evidence of it, is even more damning, try this -

9 Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation." Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[9] Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family)
and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

We should insist that this be changed immediately, or until it is changed, insist that everyone use the Conservapedia.
Lead Kindly Light!

I should point out that their page on the bias of Wikipedia is a great advertisement for the corrective nature of wikipedia itself - many of the points that seem to exhibit bias have indeed been changed and others effortlessly withstand the conservapedia criticism. For example: the US no longer uses, according to Wikipedia, the term "most favored nation", and has replaced it with, rather sensibly it has to be said, the term "Normal Trade Relations". The GATT treaty itself also spells in in the non-US English way (can't bring myself to say British English).

I'm not particularly a fan of wikipedia by the way - I just lambasted a student for writing an article in a student newspaper lifted from the wiki only yesterday. But the Conservopedia is a particularly funny example of the uneducated but increasingly powerful religious lunatic. The conservapedia page itself, sadly, is a rather fine example of selective use of evidence, circular argument, peurile name-calling, base anti-intellectualism, non-scientific pseudo reasoning, and pure simple utter madness. I might note that they link to the Religious Tolerance website to lend credance to their view that the majority of Americans disagree with evolution. This is not what their page on the subject actually says. It says that 44% of Americans (overall) believe in some form of young earth creationism, that god created man inside the last 10.000 years. 49% believe in either theistic or non-theistic evolution. That would include the two largest Western faiths by the way. Not that wikipedia as an international document should necessarily reflect majority American opinion.

One last point about largely uneducated religious crazies, whether they be christian, muslim, jewish, or buddhist: to suggest that a scientific article, or an encyclopaedia (non-american spelling, so sue me) should include crazy young earth creationism when writing about evolution and suggesting that it is worthless and biased for not doing so, is much like pointing out that the bible, or koran, or whatever is worthless and biased for not writing about scientifically valid evolution.

And we wouldn't have that said would we?