politics

Thanks for that explanation. I looked it up and, yes, it looks like Andrew created it. What a douche.

It absolutely has to suffer from the network effect. (By the way, researching this made me realize their site is slow as shit. It died on me within 2 minutes, and I had to switch to the Wayback Machine.) Their statistics say they have 56,229 articles as of writing, which could plausibly be sustainable given: 1) they're less of a target for vandalism than Wikipedia so things are more stable, 2) the English Wikipedia alone has around 125x that number, and 3) ironically they have Wikipedia to fall back on for information whenever they want. However, even within those boundaries, it's clear they're a bunch of colossal dipshits who don't know how to write beyond a high school essay. Take a quick look at our article on the Nineteenth Amendment (this was picked 100% at random from an article I found on Conservapedia first), and now compare it to Conservapedia's. There are obvious giveaways here (I'm even ignoring the stances themselves being braindead, like taking a dig at women voting at least twice in the article):

• The article itself is titled 'Nineteenth Amendment' despite multiple other countries having such an amendment, indicating they're insular morons who can't be fucked with learning about anything outside the US.
• The article has a single source in the form of a dead link to 'tennesseeencyclopedia.net' which has been dead since 2010. An archive of this shows it's titled 'Woman Suffrage Movement' (excellent) and earnestly feels like it's targeted at 6th graders in a social studies class.
• The article is two short paragraphs long and nearly completely unsourced, instead written like an essay. Meanwhile, their linked article on the Equal Rights Amendment (despite being far less notable and consequential) is far longer at over a dozen paragraphs and multiple sections, indicating they aren't seriously interested in researching and documenting history or anything else typical of an encyclopedia as much as they are in publishing their barely filtered rants about current events under the guise of an encyclopedia.

So you're correct: in addition to suffering from the network effect and having fewer subjects they can cover, it just so happens that even within the potentially sustainable boundaries they set for themselves by having fewer articles, they're a bunch of complete assclowns who have no business writing an encyclopedia (or at least they need to be reeled in in order to bother to learn how to write one, but they never will be on that hell site). They're trapped in like c. 2004–2006 Wikipedia where nobody cares about being serious reference material, except they're also too stupid to ever move past that (unlike Wikipedia whose userbase was still very smart during that Wild West era but just hadn't developed a culture of taking what they wrote seriously).

Edit: I forgot to mention that thus, they'll never actually be a replacement for Wikipedia and in no way threaten it, because genuinely the only thing they make a serious effort to cover is current events (even then it's trash, but we'll assume you have low standards). If I want to learn about absolutely anything else, I'm boned. Because literally everything else is completely surface-level (or whatever kind of slop this is), or it just doesn't exist at all. Exhibit A: I'll turn your attention to our article on algebra versus their article on algebra. Ours is comprehensive while not being extraneous: it actually goes into sufficient detail about what algebra is and its many facets, and if you want more information on any of those aspects, it houses links to dozens upon dozens of more relevant articles. Theirs is a brief introduction to the kind of algebra you learn in 7th or 8th grade with literally zero understanding that algebra is a broader field than this. They literally don't even go into functions; it's specifically just Algebra I. And it's like fucking tutorializing these things. It's not even like they don't care: they genuinely just don't know. I'm both stunned and completely unsurprised.