Aschlafly - Reception

Reception

The Conservapedia project has come under significant criticism for numerous factual inaccuracies and factual relativism. Wired magazine noted that Conservapedia was "attracting lots of derisive comments on blogs and a growing number of phony articles written by mischief makers". Iain Thomson in Information World Review wrote that "leftist subversives" may have been creating deliberate parody entries. Conservapedia has been compared to CreationWiki, a wiki written from a creationist perspective, and Theopedia, a wiki with a Reformed theology focus. Fox News obliquely compared it with other new conservative websites competing with mainstream ones, such as MyChurch, a Christian version of social networking site MySpace, and GodTube, a Christian version of video site YouTube.

Tom Flanagan, a conservative professor of political science at the University of Calgary, has argued that Conservapedia is more about religion, specifically Christianity, than conservatism and that it "is far more guilty of the crime they're attributing to Wikipedia" than Wikipedia itself. Matt Millham of the military-oriented newspaper Stars and Stripes called Conservapedia "a Web site that caters mostly to evangelical Christians". Its scope as an encyclopedia, according to its founders, "offers a historical record from a Christian and conservative perspective". APC magazine perceives this to be representative of Conservapedia's own problem with bias. Conservative Christian commentator Rod Dreher has been highly critical of the website's "Conservative Bible Project", an ongoing retranslation of the Bible which Dreher attributes to "insane hubris" on the part of "right-wing ideologues".

The project has also been criticized for promoting a false dichotomy between conservatism and liberalism and for promoting relativism with the implicit idea that there "often are two equally valid interpretations of the facts". Matthew Sheffield, columnist for the conservative daily newspaper The Washington Times and contributor to the conservative Media Research Center blog NewsBusters, argued that conservatives concerned about bias should contribute more often to Wikipedia rather than use Conservapedia as an alternative since he felt that alternative websites like Conservapedia are often "incomplete". Author Damian Thompson asserts that the purpose of Conservapedia is to "dress up nonsense as science".

Bryan Ochalla, writing for the LGBT magazine The Advocate, referred to the project as "Wikipedia for the bigoted". On the satirical news program The Daily Show, comedian Lewis Black lampooned its article on homosexuality. Writing in The Australian, columnist Emma Jane described Conservapedia as "a disturbing parallel universe where the ice age is a theoretical period, intelligent design is empirically testable, and relativity and geology are junk sciences."

Opinions criticizing the site rapidly spread throughout the blogosphere around early 2007. Schlafly appeared on radio programs Today on BBC Radio 4 and All Things Considered on NPR to discuss the site around that time. In May 2008, Schlafly and one of his homeschooled students appeared on the CBC program The Hour for the same purpose.

Stephanie Simon of the Los Angeles Times quoted two Conservapedia editors who commented favorably about Conservapedia. Matt Barber, policy director for the conservative Christian political action group Concerned Women for America, praised Conservapedia as a more family-friendly and accurate alternative to Wikipedia.

Wired magazine, in an article entitled "Ten Impressive, Weird And Amazing Facts About Wikipedia", highlighted several of Conservapedia's articles, including those on "Atheism and obesity" and "Hollywood values", amongst others. It also highlighted Conservapedia's "Examples of bias in Wikipedia" article, which encourages readers to contact Jimmy Wales and tell him to "sort it out."

Conservapedia's use of Wikipedia's format to create a conservative Christian alternative encyclopedia has been mirrored by other sites, such as Tangle.com (formerly GodTube), QubeTV and MyChurch, which adopted the format of the more prominent Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, respectively.

Wikipedia's co-creator Jimmy Wales said about Conservapedia that "free culture knows no bounds" and "the reuse of our work to build variants directly in line with our mission". Wales denied Schlafly's claims of liberal bias in Wikipedia.