One of the benefits of the Internet for teachers and students is the profusion of sources. Suddenly you can access all kinds of articles and documents about all kinds of topics. Probably one of the most fascinating of these sources is the Internet-based encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Thousands of people have collaborated (with no payment or other reward) to create an encyclopedia with more than  a million entries in English alone.

You’d expect Wikipedia to be unreliable, but with the collective intelligence of the thousands of contributors it’s usually pretty good. You have to read it with a bit of discretion, but I usually feel pretty good having my students use it to get some basic background on a topic.

Not everyone shares my opinion. Some believe that Wikipedia is too liberal and doesn’t acknowledge the role of God in the world, and favors the liberal social values rather than the conservative ones. Being pretty conservative myself, I can feel some sympathy for this point of view and so I took a look at the new Conservapedia. Unfortunately, while it’s outlook is generally conservative, it falls victim to a blind conservative bias. It does this at least as badly as its developers accuse Wikipedia of being liberal.

One example of this is the entry on George Washington which states: “Washington is perhaps the only person other than Jesus who declined enormous worldly power, in Washington’s case by voluntarily stepping aside as the ruler of a prosperous nation.” Maybe it’s just me, but comparing George Washington with Jesus Christ seems a bit over the top. George Washington gave up the presidency of a small and (at the time) unimportant country. Jesus Christ wrestled with the devil and went to hell to save sinners. Hmm, those two seem pretty dissimilar to me.

As well, Conservapedia has become the victim of spoofers. At the time I wrote this post, the entry on Bill Clinton noted that “obviously, he is the devil incarnate.” While Clinton was not a favorite of any social conservative, I think it’s fair to say that even his most fervent enemies wouldn’t be saying this.

Anyway, the point is that on the Net you need to take everything with a grain of salt. Some sources are better, and some are worse, but all reflect a bias and attempts to correct bias frequently reveal as much (or more) of a slant as the document being corrected.