Metro on Conservapedia

It’s interesting to watch how quickly (or otherwise) internet memes get to the mainstream media. It’s three weeks since a number of bloggers started writing about Conservapedia and today the freebie London paper Metro ran a story on it.

And they seem to rather miss the point of it. Their headline is “Weird, wild wiki on which anything goes” and that’ really not what Conservapedia is about. It’s not “anything goes”, but rather “only one particularly bizarre kind of misinformation goes”.

Also they seem to have missed that one of Conservapedia’s main aims is the elimination of “foreign spelling of words” The Metro article points out that Conservapedia spells “paedophilia” as “pedophilia”. But that’s just a consequence of Conservapedia’s policy of using US spellings. It doesn’t indicate any lack of intelligence on the part of Conservapedia’s editors (though, of course, there’s plenty of evidence of that elsewhere).

I suppose it was a quiet news day in the Metro office and they just pulled something interesting from the front of the “weird and wacky” file. Shame they couldn’t have come up with something worth reading like, for example, Bobby Johnson’s piece in the Guardian.