Conservapedia is my favorite crazy website. Most weeks, that doesn't mean much. However, the site became a small part of the recent Palin contretemps. I guess I should be thankful. Anyway, here's a peek inside the mind of Andy Schlafly. Keep your hands inside the vehicle at all times.
With a site like CP, there will often be new developments between recording the podcast and posting it. This week was no different; however, this time the development wasn't just another vandal-baiting article or weirdo Andy insight. What happened was something that managed to be both surprising and predictable.
It started with a discussion on the Main Page about Ken DeMeyer's habit of locking pages which had never been vandalized. This led to sysop Rob Smith creating the Community Portal, a project page for discussing site policy. Smith is a degenerate liar, but I can't see any ulterior motives for him to create the page. It appears to be a legitimate effort to reach out to the user base while addressing some of the complaints they've received. That was the surprising part.
Discussion on the page quickly turned to another of DeMeyer's idiosyncrasies - repeatedly deleting and recreating pages. DeMeyer does this a lot - five times in the last 24 hours as of this writing, in fact. The exact reason varies, but his intent is always to wipe out the edit history. Often, he'll delete and recreate a page he just edited, concealing the dozens of page changes it takes him to make even a small change. Other times, he'll recreate a page with a comment or two missing, thus eliminating embarassing remarks he made or inconvenient questions from other users. In short, he never does this for legitimate, site-related reasons, only to save face.
When DeMeyer deletes and recreates an article, it completely eliminates the edit history. The only edit in the new revision history is Ken's, thus making it appear that he created the article single-handed. Normally, he only does this to his own "parody" articles, so it doesn't really matter. However, on June 2nd he deleted and recreated the Sun Tzu article. To be fair, it's a shit article - under 300 words, completely unsourced and containing baseless speculation - but it's still better than most of what passes for scholarship on CP. I wouldn't be surprised if it were edited dozens of times by numerous editors. Of course, I can't tell you how many edits of editors because the revision history is gone.
Needless to say, some of the users were upset over this. The Community Portal quickly filled with complaints about DeMeyer's antics. This led Smith to take action against DeMeyer - a fairly safe move, seeing as how most of the sysops don't like or trust DeMeyer (although they hate Smith too). Smith clearly wasn't prepared to talk to DeMeyer about deleting pages, but he did leave a comment on DeMeyer's talk page requesting that he stop reverting comments on talk pages. DeMeyer responded by reverting Smith's comment, then deleting and recreating the talk page.
That was the predictable part.
Hear more at Dramatis Interruptus, or follow my new project at Kingdom of Sharks.