But the all-volunteer site has several thousand active readers and writers. Schlafly encourages his students to use it as a reference, saying that the articles are more concise than those on Wikipedia. On the home page, just above the daily Bible verse, he tallies total views: 12.3 million and counting.
Conservapedia's critics for the most part have no problem with the articles heaping praise on former President Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of Britain. But they worry about material presented as fact in science and medicine entries that typically seek to debunk evolution, condemn homosexuality and raise fears about abortion. They're also concerned that children who stumble onto the site will assume everything in it is authoritative.
Schlafly says students can always follow the footnotes to get more information, but few links connect to dissenting -- or even mainstream -- views.
"The project specifically targets high-schoolers, and that's probably what I find most dangerous," said Andreas Kjeldsen, 27, a Danish graduate student who wrote several entries on medieval history before stopping in protest.
Many, perhaps most, of Conservapedia's articles are free of ideology. There are brisk, straightforward entries about hundreds of topics: the tuba, Claude Monet, the nation of Latvia, Robin Hood, polygons, the Renaissance.
But consider the entry on Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (b. 1947). She "may suffer from a psychological condition that would raise questions about her fitness for office" -- namely, "clinical narcissism," Conservapedia asserts. Evidence of her instability includes her "ever-changing opinion of the Iraq war." Though Schlafly demands that entries be rigorously footnoted, these sentences are not.
Schlafly calls the armchair psychology "borderline in acceptability" for his site, but he defends the Clinton article on balance as "an objective, bias-free piece from a conservative perspective."
The whole point of his encyclopedia, he said, is to provide a different angle on the facts -- ones that a student researcher wouldn't necessarily find on Wikipedia, or in the school library.
Schlafly, the son of Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly, is a Harvard-educated attorney who practices in Chester, N.J. He does not know most of Conservapedia's contributors; they're spread out across the world and communicate through online pseudonyms. He promotes writers he finds trustworthy to be systems administrators, who are able to block editors and protect certain articles from changes.
