Conservapedia: Quote Mining or Super-Weaners?
I visit Conservapedia every now and then for a laugh. Since creationists are always quote mining, I thought it would be fun to see what Conservapedia has to say on this topic.
A good (genuine) definition of quote mining is on the Info Pollution web site:
Quote mining is looking through large amounts of material for quotes that can be taken out of context or otherwise distorted. Quote mining is especially popular among creationists, but is probably found in any controversial subject.
Now let’s see what Conservapedia says about it. The funny thing here (well, we did come looking for comedy!) is that their entire article is only 81 words in all of four sentences (most Conservapedia articles are embarrassingly short), but it’s like a fine cheesecake. We’ll have to take very small bites in order to savor it (and avoid massive indigestion). Here’s their first sentence:
Quote mining is a meaningless term that expresses objection when a quote is used against person quoted.
Really? A meaningless term? I quoted a very good definition at the beginning of this article. A meaningless term wouldn’t have a thorough, well-defined description like that. Hey, you want an example of a meaningless term? How about “kind” as used by creationists! There’s a vague, muddy term that doesn’t actually describe anything! Go ahead. Define it. I dare you!
The second sentence begins with the phrase:
This term is not recognized by the dictionary…
I checked two online dictionaries (Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com), and Conservapedia is right! “Quote mining” is not in either. Conservapedia actually contains an accurate statement! But is it a meaningful statement?
Let’s take a fundie term and see if it’s in the dictionary, shall we? If you read my earlier article on Fundie Taxonomy, you’ll remember all of the crazy words they invented so they wouldn’t have to use the evolution-based scientific taxonomy. They have their word “holobaramin”. Don’t ask me what it means. It’s such a bizarre, convoluted concept that I still don’t understand it.
I checked both dictionaries, and nope! It’s not there! I guess “holobaramin” is a meaningless term!
Now let’s get back to the Conservapedia article. The rest of that second sentence reads:
…and is used primarily by evolution believers to oppose the use of quotations by evolutionists that tend to discredit their theory.
That’s not an accurate definition. The objection to quote mining is that it takes a very brief part of a much longer quotation, and by doing so removes it from its context and changes its meaning.
Now let’s move onto sentence three:
The entire legal and political fields use quotes by others against them.
Something doesn’t sound quite right with the grammar, but otherwise that’s a completely benign sentence! They wrote an entire sentence without sounding like total retards!
Sentence four is:
There is nothing objectionable about this practice, and the term quote-mining could apply to nearly every legal proceeding and political campaign.
Whoops! I spoke too soon! They are total retards. Quote mining is an entirely objectionable practice! The dirtiest political campaigns are marred by quote mining. Think back on some of the attack ads you’ve seen in recent elections. Were all of the quotes used fairly?
Lies, Damn Lies, and Conservapedia
That’s their entire article on the subject. However, they do have a footnote. In order to support their claim that “quote mining” is only used by “evolution believers”, the footnote states:
The term “quote mining” shows up on only 52,700 Google pages as of June 28, 2007.
Well, sheer numbers is a meaningless metric. It’s the quality of pages that counts. But let’s play their game. (BTW, in typical Conservapedia fashion, the above sentence is not correct. As of October 1st, there are only 202 Google pages containing the term. That is, pages at Google.com that contain the term. I think what these pinheads mean is 52,700 web pages, as reported by a Google search. This sort of sloppy thinking is why creationists can’t comprehend evolution.)
When I ran the words:
quote mining
(note the lack of enclosing quotation marks) through Google today, I got 356,000 web pages. That’s considerably more than what those dolts said in their article. Could it have grown that much in just over three months? I doubt it.
Maybe they searched on the exact term, which would be a more accurate search anyway. Running:
“quote mining”
(note the addition of the quotation marks) through Google, I got 27,100 web pages. Wait a minute. That’s less than Conservapedia claims! Did 25,000 web pages just vanish? Well, I don’t know what these people are doing. I’m wondering if they’re just making up their own statistics.
MOTHER SUCKER!
So let’s play the credibility-based-on-Google-hits game. By their logic, if something doesn’t return enough pages in Google, it has no credibility. Don’t ask me what the minimum is. They don’t say.
I was trying to think of a lesser-known term that is recognized within the scientific community as a valid term. Let’s look at elephant seals. I used to know some of the scientists who studied the colony at Año Nuevo. They told me they were the first to describe a particular behavior in the literature, so they had to come up with a term for it. Since it was published in a journal, and by the rules of precedence, that makes it official.
Elephant seals haul out onto the shore in the winter. Babies are born on shore and nurse for about 28 days, after which their mothers turn off the spigot. Most babies now have to learn to swim and hunt on their own. Occasionally, however, one of the pups has a different idea. I will now turn the narrative over to David Bolling’s article from Odyssey Magazine:
Occasionally a “weaner” will find a lactating cow who’s lost her pup and begin suckling again, putting on even more weight and becoming what is called … a “double-mother-sucker super-weaner.”
Yes, it’s the real term. So let’s look that up in Google! “Double mother sucker” returns four pages. “Super weaner” returns 58 pages. The whole term “double mother sucker super weaner” only returns one page. Is Conservapedia trying to tell us that this legitimate scientific term has no credibility?
One Last Test
I decided to perform one last test to see if the Conservapedia approach to determining credibility has merit.
Searching Google for “quote mining” returned 356,000 pages.
Searching Google for “Conservapedia” returned 272,000 pages. Wait! That’s less! By Conservapedia’s own standards, they’re worthless!
October 7th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
yeah, that’s right, lump yourselves in with lawyers and politicians, those bastions of trustworthiness and honesty.
i think atheist criticism just became superfluous.
L
October 11th, 2007 at 7:54 am
Interesting… A fundie troll (you know, the ones who want essentially a theocracy) taking a libertarian (aka mildly anarchist) political stance. Wow, how does one resolve the differences between those two ends of the spectrum? That makes my brain hurt!
October 14th, 2007 at 2:54 am
That’s funny that they would defend the practice of quote mining instead of claiming they don’t do it — it almost shows a perverse kind of honesty. Except for the fact that they willfully ignore the distinction between using someone’s own quote against the person quoted vs. taking a sentence out of context in order to change its meaning.
Yes, when a politician says “I never claimed the invasion of Iraq was about finding weapons of mass destruction” to go look at old articles to find the quote that shows he’s lying. Quote-mining is a bit of a different animal though. It’s more like quoting the first sentence only from an article that begins “Most reputable scientists today believe that X is true. Yet in this paper we present new evidence that X is in fact false.”
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Nice writing there Lepht. I see your use of capital letters is limited. (hint: it’s the shift key) I also note that yes is not something you use very often. I’m thinking it must be some of that high quality home school education.