Could an utterly irritating site like Conservapedia *, be a useful resource for teaching (and thus deserve the original meaning of encyclopedia)? Well, as weird as it seems at first sight, there’s a post up there at Botanizing showing that, yes, it can…
* As a note to my few readers who are ignorant of this very unbiased conservative encyclopedia (probably some of my nice French readers): I do not link, but you may still use google for a good laugh if not suffering from any bad heart condition (it’s sometimes quite hard to realise some people actually think things you may find there, but they do, really really).
Sans aller jusqu’à surfer sur cette étrange encyclopédie, je suis aller là : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservapedia
Quand on pense à L’encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, les temps changent…
Undoubtedly conservapedia contains some statements (and entire pages, in fact) which are factually correct and sometimes even only minimally biased (they got some math stuff correct, for example, although far from all of it). I think that’s far from enough to support the claim that it can be used for teaching. I mean, if I take a random set of sentences and randomly add a negation to half of them, then a lot of the resulting sentences will be correct (one in two, in fact), but that doesn’t make it very useful.
Well, this is somewhat the point, but teaching how and why an argument can be wrong sometimes happens to be more entertaining than classical demonstration… This would be true of any pseudo-scientific claim thought so that a crackpot mine may be of interest… :-)
Ah, and I always suspected maths to bend toward conservatism… :-)))