The Conservapedia puts an echo in your ear
Posted by 3Dsound at Monday, June 04, 2007 6:19 PM and is filed under RationalWiki,conservative politics,Knowledge,Fundamentalism,Conservapedia 
Fundamentalism (updated below)
In the spotlight for demonstrating how the Conservapedia abuses source material: Bethany S. (24-May-07), Harriet Tubman, Conservapedia [online encyclopedia explicitly incorporating politically conservative and right-wing Christian bias; written by volunteers supervised by Andrew Schlafly], online at conservapedia.com (accessed 04-
You've gotta love Conservative values ... Here's a Conservapedia article about Harriet Tubman – written by the Conservapedia's most recently promoted sysop, Bethany S. (who pledges, "As a Conservapedia Sysop, I will NEVER ARBITRARILY block anyone who is not in violation of the Conservapedia Commandments or related CP Guidelines"). Compare Bethany's article on Harriet Tubman with the one at Wikipedia. I'll let you decide if the echo in your ear constitutes plagiarism, re-writing or unacknowledged source material.
UPDATE, September 16, 2007: According to the RationalWiki (which serves as a Conservapedia watchdog) plagiarism is a common practice at the Conservapedia. The RationalWiki lists many examples. In addition to those, check out the July 2007 Conservapedia contributions made by Bethany S., where you can see she's copied extensively from the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships (for example, compare the Dictionary's entry for the USS Achernar with the one in the Conservapedia authored by Bethany S.).
Anyone is free to use the information created by the U.S. Government without fear of copyright infringement, but the Conservapedia confuses that freedom with a license to crib its content from government documents.
UPDATE, November 21, 2007: The current version of the page listing the July 2007 Conservapedia contributions made by Bethany S. no longer includes any reference to the naval ships for which she wrote Conservapedia entries. According to the page's edit-history, Bethany S. deleted the references to the ships on September 27, 2007. Still, each of the ship entries, which she wrote, remains intact and continues to show the extent of plagerism between her contributions and the original source for the information, the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.
For whatever reason, when Bethany S. altered her list of July 2007 contributions, she destroyed some of the evidence linking herself to the plagerized ship entries. The practice of eleminating embarrassing information is known as "burning the evidence" and turns out to be common at the Conservapeida, according to the RationalWiki. The RationalWiki gives examples of shallow burning (such as what Bethany S. did) and deep burning, in which all of the evidence is destroyed.
The edit-history still permits us to learn what Bethany S. contributed to the Conservapedia in July 2007, and in turn, we can use that information to see how the Conservapedia plagerizes its content from a government document. However, the RationalWiki alerts us to how vulnerable wiki pages are to alteration and deletion and to the prevalence of those practices at the Conservapedia. Thus, for your reference, here's the list of ship entries that Bethany S. wrote in July 2007: Abraham, Absaroka, Absegami, Acacia, Absecon, Accelerate, Accentor, Accentor2, Accohanoc, Accokeek, Accomac, Accomac2, Accomac3, Acedia, Achelous, Achernar, Achigan, Achilles, Achomawi, Acme, Acme2, Acoma, Acoma2, Acontius, Acontius, Acree, Action, Active , Active2, Active3, Active4, Active5 and Actus.
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