Conservapedia

I read today about an alternative to Wikipedia called Conservapedia. This site was supposed to be an alternative reading of Wikipedia meant to - I guess - evade heavy handed editorial bias on the part of those users who regularly review scientific and political articles.

Though a bit sceptical about this project, I was prepared to look at this with an open mind. After all, there are certain forms of political correctness that do seem prevalent on Wikipedia - the constant insertion of "Citation Needed" for perfectly well known facts I find irritating, for instance.

So hoping to keep an open mind, I opened what was sure to be the litmus test page.

http://www.conservapedia.com/Evolution

All I can say is... wow. This is hard stuff to take seriously.

I expected to see criticism of evolution, of course. But that's all the article in question contains: only criticism. There is no description of the thing being criticized, no outlining of the theory's tenets, or the evidentiary case for it. The thing reads like a grade school rebuttal, and not anything you'd expect to find in an encyclopedia, even a conservative one. When I think of some of the scholarly criticisms I've seen of evolution, including Cardinal Schonborn's article in which he lambastes the development of multiverse cosmologies specifically designed to get around the God problem... well surely Conservapedia really could have done better than this.

I think even Conservatives would do well to stay away from this. It reads like an Onion or Uncyclopedia parody.