Libertarian Librarian

Sadly, it is not a joke. Real people with something approximating a brain appear to have come up with it. Now, it is a wiki, which means anybody can publish entries there, or change other people's entires, so some, perhaps many, of the individual entries may be parody. But the overall concept is not a hoax, but an actual attempt to create a "conservative" alternative to Wikipedia.

As amusing as the Idiotopedia is, when you can get the poor, sad thing to work, it is very troubling as well. It bills itself as reliable, and if you lacked sufficient context or understanding, it could even seem that way. And, as this guy notes very effectively and eloquently, the creators of the Idiotopedia aren't just throwing it out to express their opinion. They are throwing out there to try and change other people's opinions. Because they believe they are right. Facts and science be damned (literally, more than likely).

Here's the DOBA bit:

The condition here could be (and has been) described as a delusional mindset, but I'm not sure it's that simple, that harmless, or that easily excused. These people are not content to simply live in their own little alternate reality. They are determined to make certain that we live there, too. This means that when inconvenient little fact come up - the ugly little facts and inconvenient truths that can slay even the most beautiful hypotheses - reality gets rewritten and the facts that disagree with the core beliefs get omitted.

Yeah. Don't know about you guys, but I don't want to live in a world where George Washington's Christianity is more important than his visionary leadership, or his precedent setting Presidency.

Idiotopedia has a new front page up, btw. Perhaps a vague attempt to take advantage of their recent notoriety-- the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, after all. Or not, since it is about as stark and unappealing as a web page is capable of being. At least it's clean. Says so, right up front. Here's the intro text (in case you can't get in, which is fairly likely):

A conservative encyclopedia you can trust.

Conservapedia has over 3,800 educational, clean and concise entries on historical, scientific, legal, and economic topics, as well as more than 350 lectures and term lists. There have been over 545,000 page views and over 15,500 page edits. Already Conservapedia has become one of the largest user-controlled free encyclopedias on the internet. This site is growing rapidly.

Educational AND clean. Such a deal! Oddly, they don't mention that they are also almost certainly the slowest user-controlled free encyclopedia on the internet. And, of course, the most idiotic.