User:RobSmith/Essay: Is Conservapedia an attempt to reinvent the wheel?
Conservapedia was founded as an online resource to counter the perceived liberal bias in Wikipedia. To what extent has it met that challenge?
The Internet Decency Act of 1995 was an entirely conservative triumph, to keep the hand of government censorship and propaganda out of development of the private sector. It led to the massive growth of Big Tech. The Zeran ruling of 1998 in Zeran v. AOL affirmed this congressional mandate to allow the internet to develop its own rules regarding content in internet user conduct without the intrusion of government regulating free speech. Wikipedia was the first to seize on this mandate in an organized effort to shape rules for internet users. Wikipedia rules on content contribution and user conduct have since been copied wholesale to various spawn of Big Tech, Yahoo, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc etc, each one tweaking the master blueprint to fit the bias of its own internal Admins, owners, and free market entrepreneurs.
One of the first problems Wikipedia encountered was to decide how to make decisions, how to define democracy, and more importantly to define for itself, the number of organized participants on a global basis, how many in number are required to gather a consensus? 51%? 60%? 66? 75% or the number finally reached to be agreeable to the whole community at 80% (4 out of 5, or 1 dissenter). Once this agreement of a global consensus emerged, the consensus view became definitive, and the minority view was granted a voice to express criticism. It also meant the majority consensus view could pile on, at a rate of 4/5 bytes, counter-criticism for each byte the minority view exceeded his 1/5 voice.
Conservapedia had been infiltrated by ratvandals, more experienced internet users who had participated in these global debates and who had designed the WikiMedia software, to sow discord and hinder Conservapedia's development. By that time, the flowering bed of conservative free market values in Silicon Valley had already been hi-jacked by leftists. It is well known how Wikipedia has been taken over and is controlled by the US intelligence community,[1] and how Twitter had 80 FBI counterintelligence operatives colluding with Twitter Admin.
These more experienced ratvandals conducted a successful psyop, building on their years of experience fighting vandalism in Wikipedia, sowing discord and mistrust among Conservapedia's fledgling userbase and Admin community, mistrust which lingered for the better part of two decades. Conservapedia was never able to have a sit-down discussion among its own Admins to decide for itself on consensus building, acceptable user conduct, qualifying sources, etc. Hence its Conservapedia:Guidelines were crafted piecemeal from the Wikipedia blueprint despite strenuous objections from some Admins that "we don't want to be like Wikipedia"; these dissenters offered no other alternative than chaos, with their refusal to cooperate and work together. So Conservapedia remains neither a democracy, nor governed by consensus, nor a mobocracy. What then, is it?
An "us vs. them" paranoia took over. Any attempt by Admins to offer a "proposal" or "suggestion" was met with, "You must be one of them!". To the extent there ever was any cooperation among Admins, it was to see who could block a new registered account quicker as a "suspected vandal". No serious discussion on dealing with vandalism or blocking policy was tolerated, as Admins wiled the hours away getting an endorphin rush by taking their vengeance out on their percieved enemies playing whack-a-mole at home. No thought was given to building a community of users with policy guidelines on acceptable user conduct. The Admins themselves were unregulated and unaccountable, and unwilling to work with each other.
There is no chain-of-command or pyramid in Conservapedia's management structure. All Admins are on equal footing with each other and not accountable to each other. They compete against each other for the big bosses favor. Hence, wheel wars are common. This is not the example Admins should set to assistant sysops and registered users, that who can be the biggest bully or can swing the fastest sledgehammer wins.
So how do we have a consensus in Conservapedia? Do we take a vote? Do we have one vote? Do we have two votes? Do we have three votes? Have we agreed on how many votes constitute a victory or consensus? Have we all agreed to play by the same rules? Those agreements or commitments are made individually, and publicly, before a vote is ever taken.
Early failures
Early on, User:Karajou obtained the password for Rationalwiki 1.0, at the time a closed wiki. It was clear then that a primary objective of Ratvandals was to sow division between Conservapedia Administrators. All CP Admin at the time knew this. The Kevin Conley letter was one such event.[2]
However, CP Admin mailing lists never addressed this problem. Any attempt to raise policy issues, such as establishing dispute resolution processes, only degenerated into accusations between Admins, such as trying to make CP like Wikipedia, or being a subversive Ratvandal infiltrator. To this day, Admins continue making accusations against other Admins without there being any agreed upon, established dispute resolution process. Sheer insanity. Putting the cart before the horse without there being any horse, at all. So Admins just bellow louder and louder to be heard over each other.
Dispute resolution
As of 2024, Conservapedia still has no viable dispute resolution process. In fact, Administrators have been personally attacked and vilified for making formal proposals on policy and establishing processes. The use of gossip and innuendo, and riling up mobs of socket puppet trolls, remains the frequently used precedent for resolving disputes between Admin.