I wonder if this has a name, it's a common reflex that pops up regularly, and yeah most of the time nothing comes out of it.
EDIT: Basically that's how these projects turn out. Having a theme park was never the point; blackjack and hookers were the point. Having a federated Wikipedia alternative isn't the point; having an encyclopedia where you can push an insane description of a topic and present it as reality is the point. And really, that makes for a shitty encyclopedia. Shitty enough for it to disappear before doing damage to the shared sense of reality society needs? No, but still shitty.
And wow somebody has put a lot of work in this page https://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia_proven_right Great resource if you want to know what US bible people care about. They have institutionalised their confirmation bias.
There is evidence of the Mediterranean Basin flooding after breach of a land bridge across what is now the Strait of Gibraltar [1,2] some 5 million years ago. In the same way there is some evidence of the Black Sea rapidly expanding some 8000 years ago [3]. Similar 'catastrophic flood' scenarios have played out elsewhere on the planet which has led to the rise of flood myths like the Biblical flood. While Conservapedia goes heavy on scripture in laying out their proof for a historical basis for the flood (i.e. they are just as biased as Wikipedia tends to be on politically contentious subjects) it is a rational position to state that the myriad of flood myths around the world and along the ages are based on historical flood events.
In short, Conservapedia does what Wikipedia does but replaces the 'progressive' bias with a 'conservative' one.
[1] https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/science-and-technology/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanclean_flood
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
And if you don't find the biblical flood implausible, well, I'm somewhat intrigued why you believe that to be an option.
Don't give me the "contentious" spiel. I don't care what some reader of Conservapedia may think. I'm asking you.
No ad-hominems, or rather you are looking at this as a 'liberal' would while I described a scenario in which a 'conservative' looks at the mentioned article and concept. In the "conservative's" opinion what is written there is just as implausible as what is written in the Conservapedia article on the 'truth' of the flood story. Both Wikipedia as well as Conservapedia are biased which is what this was about, not about whether the flood or someone feeling non-binary is true.
Both-sidesing this when you have already been presented with indefensible nonsense such as “e=mc^2 is liberal claptrap” is shameful. That page hasn’t been edited since mid-2022. There’s an entire article called “liberal claptrap” linked to from that statement that has remained unedited for 7 months. It shouldn’t even exist.
That garbage is not constructive and has no place in respectable discourse.
In my view, Conservapedia is an encyclopedia only by medieval standards. It is not useful to me except for entertainment and maybe if I wanted to write US cable news ad copy. What is it to you? Do you refer to it when you want to know about historical floods?
Conservapedia calls e=mc2 "liberal claptrap".[1] The article on Oppenheimer has "Like other liberals, Oppenheimer was not as smart as he wanted to be" right in the lead and the article itself mostly seems to be about Oppenheimer's communist links more than anything else. Articles like Homosexual Agenda[3] contain so much retarded bullshit I don't even know what bit to quote.
What I'm trying to say is "it's the same as Wikipedia, with with Conservative bias" completely and utter bollocks. Conservapedia is a fringe website that's not conservative, but just crazy. Anyone claiming anything else is deeply misinformed.
[1]: https://www.conservapedia.com/E%3Dmc2
Now this implies that this "conservative" bias is on a level of the "progressive" one. As if there are two sides, these two, and that the "conservative" has equal, if not more, merit than the "progressive" one. It's the false balance.
Funnily enough, Conservapedia has the article on it. But opening it reveals that it's not that rationality suddenly penetrated the conserva-universe, it's just that they project they exact thing they do onto the "liberals".
I'm not so sure I'd call Wikipedia 'progressive'.
If you're looking for the chemical composition of some substance or want to look up something related to physics or mathematics Wikipedia tends to do just fine. Articles on history are a mixed bag, especially recent history and especially anything related to 'the West'. For political subjects Wikipedia is less than useless given the aforementioned 'colonisation' but also because political operatives from 'all sides' do their best to paint as rosy a picture of 'their' side as possible.
Fair enough and indeed there are many examples. However I think good faith/steelmanning needs to come back in our discourse. It strikes me as an 'insane' description to suggest that the problems with Wikipedia can be properly captured by their resistance to 'insane' descriptions
Beyond the Wikipedia definition, I've heard the term used to describe the phenomenon of people looking at an ugly codebase with tons of special cases and expectations, thinking they can create a leaner version only to end up going nowhere because all those special cases and expectations that made for ugly UML diagrams had reasons to exist and the overconfidence led to feature creep to justify the time investment to stakeholders. I.e. a good explanation for why it's often better to refactor than rewrite.
Regardless of whether reddit made the correct decision banning those suspect subreddits, it turns out having a community composed almost entirely of those cast-offs is not a pleasant place to be.
Wikipedia could be made much less political, much more open, and given some mechanism by which consensus could be achieved without having to fight with tin pot tyrants in control of a wiki page.
Wikipedia mostly works, but there are parts of the tech and processes that are unnecessary, counterproductive, and fundamentally political.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BOLD,_revert,_discus...
You make a change, it gets reverted, and then you discuss it. The number one mistake I see new editors make is they don't understand how discussion works and when to seek additional input.
After being reverted, you're expected to start a discussion on the talk page. So many people do not do that, and instead try to communicate through 200 character edit summaries.
But talk pages are just the first step. The next step is to get more people involved. There are a bunch of informal rules which editors have tried to write down on how you can bring more people to a talk page in a fair way (otherwise you would only solicit input from people you would agree with).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution
The typical way this is done is through an RfC, which is a structured discussion between multiple options. When you set up an RfC to resolve a dispute, a bot randomly messages people who are interested in the general area to comment at the talk page. That means you get a bunch of uninvolved editors that don't really have any stake in the dispute and are more level-headed.
The discussion's consensus itself is then evaluated by someone (a closer) who must be uninvolved. In a contentious subject it is often an administrator who has never edited in the topic area before. The closer must give reasons for their decision and an explanation, and there is a working appeals process.
Contrast to virtually any other website where decisions are frequently made by people involved in disputes, you typically don't get reasons for why something is moderated, and you can't effectively appeal to another decision maker as you don't understand the reasoning upon which the decision is based.
Fun fact: prefiguration, a practice popular with anarchists, is essentially a form of refactoring rather than a rewrite.
Arguably the problem with Soviet/Maoist communism and the French Revolution also was that it merely replaced who's in charge rather than dismantling the system of someone being in charge (i.e. it focused on individuals, not systems). It's worth noting though that the French Revolution did end up creating a representative democracy eventually even if it took a detour of replacing the monarch with a number of different autocrats - much like Cromwell in the UK for that matter.
So I'd say the problem wasn't seeing flaws and wanting to replace the systems but thinking the flaws could be fixed without addressing the system in its entirety or looking at it from an actual systems theory point of view. Another fun fact: a lot of Nazis ended up back in positions of power in post-war Germany (both Germanies actually).
I strongly disagree. They threw out way too much, not just who was in charge. "Throwing out the baby with the bathwater". In the case of Mao they made sweeping changes to agriculture several times. Each with the potential of causing massive famines, and together caused the largest man made disaster in history.
That's not just replacing who is in charge (which would have been MUCH BETTER), it's dismantling a thousand years of knowledge and tradition in favor of something they thought was better. Absolute disaster.
The French revolution, and USSR did quite similar things with disastrous consequences.