Conservapedia:Burning the Evidence
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== Examples of Deep Burning on Conservapedia == | == Examples of Deep Burning on Conservapedia == | ||
| − | Items that are deep-burned are often harder to track down and present to you, but we do our best. The practice of deep burning on Conservapedia is reserved for the most embarrassing topics, of course. | + | Items that are deep-burned are often harder to track down and present to you, but we do our best. The practice of deep burning on Conservapedia is reserved for the most embarrassing topics, of course. |
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| + | === FBI-related material === | ||
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| + | Not surprisingly, issues surrounding the [[Conservapedia:FBI Incident|FBI Incident]] are among the most thoroughly burned. It seems that, at 01:19 on 2 November 2007, TK deleted all the content of the [http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation talk page for the FBI itself] and then [http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=TK&page= deleted] and recreated the page itself. (Deleting the content is shallow, of course. Deleting and recreating the entire page is deep—the edit history disappears.) He then helpfully edited back into the recreated page a small amount of material from the original page, from 6 weeks earlier, that he considered harmless. | ||
Fortunately, we have saved much of the burned material. Here it is: | Fortunately, we have saved much of the burned material. Here it is: | ||
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Nice work, TK! | Nice work, TK! | ||
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| + | === Gun Control Talk page === | ||
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| + | The talk page for gun control has been a burn magnet for much of late 2008. Partly because, like so many pages, it's full of garbage, and partly because, well, like the FBI incident, it's viral. In fact, the go-around of December 2008 involved (at last count) a paragraph being shallow-burned 13 times. This is more than the amount of mayhem that got the [[Conservapedia:FBI Incident|FBI Incident]] page started, but that was at a more innocent time. Sassing CP is now a much bigger industry. | ||
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| + | In any case, Philip J. Rayment appears poised to archive the talk page, at a moment when the interesting material appears to be absent. To meliorate the loss of such an unfortunate occurrence, we have saved it [[Conservapedia:Burning the Evidence/Gun Control Talk|here]]. | ||
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| + | == Further Help == | ||
You should make use of Internet archive sites. E.g. [http://web.archive.org/ archive.org] currently has copies of [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:Aschlafly Andrew Schlafly's talk page] from various points in 2007. However there are two caveats: (1) archiving is sporadic, so they might not have what you want (2) older archives disappear, so if they do have what you want, save a local copy for yourself while you can. | You should make use of Internet archive sites. E.g. [http://web.archive.org/ archive.org] currently has copies of [http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.conservapedia.com/User_talk:Aschlafly Andrew Schlafly's talk page] from various points in 2007. However there are two caveats: (1) archiving is sporadic, so they might not have what you want (2) older archives disappear, so if they do have what you want, save a local copy for yourself while you can. | ||
Revision as of 00:51, 30 December 2008
Burning the Evidence is a common activity among criminals, some governments and government agencies, some wiki encyclopedia administrators, and other people that need to hide something. It covers any attempt to destroy evidence—"burning" is just a figure of speech. In the field of law, destruction of evidence by any party to a case is considered a serious offense, known technically as spoliation.
The burning of evidence has a well-known history. It is perhaps at its most notorious when some entity (government, etc.) attempts to remove from the historical record the memory of some event that actually happened. This goes back at least to the ancient Roman concept of Damnatio Memoriae—all references to a person ever having existed are removed from the record. (The fact that cases of this are well-documented shows how ineffective the process is.)
A well-known instance of governmental burning of evidence was the behavior of the Stalin regime in Soviet Russia. They attempted to remove a number of people from the historical record, including hilarious doctoring of photographs. A case of this can be found on the Wikipedia page Damnatio Memoriae. In modern times, the Indonesian government literally burned the evidence in the Schapelle Corby case
This activity has a famous reference in literature. George Orwell's famous work Nineteen Eighty-Four describes a totally despotic and authoritarian government that controls the population by, among other things, controlling the language and controlling all information. People and events are routinely expunged from the historical record. Such people become, in the "newspeak" language, "unpersons". In the government agencies where information is destroyed, the receptacles into which documents are placed for expunging are called "memory holes", a term which has become synoymous with the destruction of information.
Contents |
Burning the Evidence on a Wiki
Sometimes the administrators of wiki encyclopedias become so drunk with power, and so thin-skinned, that they attempt to remove material that they find not to their liking. There are a few things to note about this practice:
- Editing articles in the main page space is, of course, completely natural, and such editing often involves deletion. This is to be expected (though "revert wars" can sometimes be amusing to watch, especially when the participants are doctrinaire morons). However, it is generally considered to be a violation of wiki etiquette to delete material from a talk page. Talk pages are ongoing discussion journals. How offensive such deletions are depends on the context—It is particularly offensive to delete anything from another user's talk page.
- Because of the way wiki software works, especially the Wikimedia software that is used by Wikipedia, Conservapedia, and RationalWiki, mere deletion of material from any page, main space or talk, does not irreversibly remove it from the historical record. To achieve the degree of perfidy of Orwell's Memory Holes, more drastic measures are required. Such activity is called "deep burning". It is frequently practiced on Conservapedia.
The deletion, by person A, of material from person B's talk page, that had been placed there by person C, is a particularly flagrant violation of Wiki etiquette and of common-sense respect for the principles of free speech that are so important to our nation's freedom. And yet, sysops sometimes burn material in other sysops' talk pages. A legendarily flagrant case of this was the deletion, by Conservapedia sysop TK, of an open letter from AmesG (that's right, our User:AmesG!) from sysop SharonS's talk page. [2]. Apparently some sysops are "real" and some are just impressionable teenage girls that need to be protected from the real world.
Shallow Burning on Conservapedia
Because deletion of embarrassing material is so common on Conservapedia, when we at RationalWiki point to foolishness over there (see, for example, all the articles in Conservapedia:What_is_going_on_at_CP), we routinely point to a "diff" from the CP edit history. Whenever something is "shallow burned", the deletion is visible in the edit history. When you want to cite such a thing in an RW entry, do the following:
- Go to the edit history and look around. It might look, in part, like this:
- (cur) (last) 10:15, 25 October 2007 TK (Talk | contribs) (?Drop outs)
- (cur) (last) 10:13, 25 October 2007 TK (Talk | contribs) (?Not Fond of the Main Page Color)
- (cur) (last) 09:26, 25 October 2007 Maestro (Talk | contribs) m (?Drop outs)
- (cur) (last) 09:26, 25 October 2007 Maestro (Talk | contribs) (?Not Fond of the Main Page Color)
- (cur) (last) 09:17, 25 October 2007 BethanyS (Talk | contribs)
- Clicking on "last" will show the changes between that version and the one before. Clicking on the date and time (e.g. "09:26, 25 October 2007" will show that specific version. Clicking on "contribs" will show what other foolishness that person has been engaged in lately.
If you are writing something for RW or elsewhere, and you want to cite a specific individual version, such that it will not be subject to shallow burning, click on the individual version time/date, and, when that version comes up in your browser, copy and paste the URL from the browser's URL window.
A URL pointing to a specific version in this way is called a "permalink". We use them extensively at RW for our citations of Conservapedia Craziness.
If you want to cite a difference (say, a particularly moronic deletion of embarrassing information), click on the "(last)" link for the change (or use the more sophisticated "Compare selected versions" feature), and when the appropriate "diff" page comes up, copy and past the URL as before.
Deep Burning on Conservapedia
Particularly embarrassing material is sometimes "deep burned".
Page Deletion
The simplest way that sysops can do this is simply to delete the entire page. Its edit history (or "fossil record", as we say here at RW) goes into the memory hole. A common place that this is done is with personal user pages and user talk pages. New users often ask embarrassing questions (funny how that happens!), and such users are often quickly banned, and turned into "unpersons" by having their user pages and talk pages permanently deleted. Such users are often naive about this practice, and engage in their embarrassing discussions on their own talk pages.
Savvy operators know about this, and do their work on pages that can't simply be deleted, such as the talk pages for important topics such as Talk:Main Page or Talk:Examples of bias in Wikipedia, or on sysop's own personal talk pages, such as User Talk:TK.
However, in recent times, even important personal talk pages have been deep burned. On October 27, 2007, Jallen/Niandra burned Andrew Schlafly's own talk page. This was repeated on March 3, 2008 under the Newspeak term "routine cleaning". We are attempting to recover the lost data for you.
Conservative's Shout Outs
In the single biggest page burning event Conservative deleted, his shout out to PZ Myers. To cover up this whole embarrassing incident, he deleted the Atheism talk page, Public Awarness of the Atheism Article, and then, in a blatant act of overreacting, the big pages themselves: Talk:Mainpage and the right and left mainpage templates all with out their history.
Fortunately a piece of censorship this large would not stand and Philip J. Rayment restored the pages with their history [3] [4] [5] [6].
This event highlighted how far some of the sysops will go to hide their own screw ups.
Bogus Archiving
The more evil sysops (TK is a particularly egregious practitioner of this) use the "archiving" feature of the Wikimedia sofware, and then delete the archive. Archiving moves the material and its edit history over to another page. Operators who have nothing to hide often use this feature to keep the discussions on talk pages to a manageable length, while moving out-of-date material to another location. But, at Conservapedia, there is a more sinister use.
Because of this, the friendly elves at RationalWiki periodically make copies of vulnerable CP pages.
For example, at 20:31 on 24 October 2007, sysop TK "archived" the talk page for Richard Dawkins, on which there had been some interesting discussion. (Briefly, Andy Schlafly, and the other powers that be, are stark raving nuts. But you could have guessed that.) The edit histories for the archived material involved a lot of Shallow Burning, that permalinks could have shown. Those edits were compressed out, so the archived versions show only the final results. Fortunately, we have saved the version of the page at 09:32 20 Oct 2007 Conservapedia:Burning_the_Evidence/DawkinsTalk0932_20Oct07. We apologize for the incompleteness of this, and are working on more effective means of closing the memory hole.
Oversight
Andy, PJR, Jallen and CPWebmaster all have oversight[1], a Mediawiki extension designed to allow oversighters to hide edits permanently. Unlike deleting and recreating pages, oversighting doesn't leave any logs to non-oversighters, so it is very hard to see if the above have used their privileges without painstakingly checking diffs, but since we haven't noticed any edits mysteriously disappearing, it is probable that they haven't - much.
Examples of Shallow Burning on Conservapedia
There are quite a number of talk pages of higher-than-average controversy in their content, that Conservapedia folks routinely delete material from. For your convenience, we have saved some of them from any future deep burning and presented them in easy-to-peruse format.
The way we have done this is to create a page here on RationalWiki that mirrors the page on Conservapedia, but with intermediate versions not shown. That is, sequences of normal edits on CP are collapsed into a single edit here. You can examine the history of the page and see the deletions in convenient form. The timestamps here are not important—the edit comments that we place on our versions show the original timestamps from CP. Our edit comments may also give the edit comment on CP, if it was particularly amusing.
We have omitted trivial changes and deletions that are justifiable as repair of clear vandalism.
Examples of Deep Burning on Conservapedia
Items that are deep-burned are often harder to track down and present to you, but we do our best. The practice of deep burning on Conservapedia is reserved for the most embarrassing topics, of course.
Not surprisingly, issues surrounding the FBI Incident are among the most thoroughly burned. It seems that, at 01:19 on 2 November 2007, TK deleted all the content of the talk page for the FBI itself and then deleted and recreated the page itself. (Deleting the content is shallow, of course. Deleting and recreating the entire page is deep—the edit history disappears.) He then helpfully edited back into the recreated page a small amount of material from the original page, from 6 weeks earlier, that he considered harmless.
Fortunately, we have saved much of the burned material. Here it is:
- ===Question===
- Don't know if this is the right place, but I want to know --if it's not very touchy for you-- about the FBI investigations on vandalism. In Christ --Eury 23:14, 18 September 2007 (EDT)
- Yeah, how is that investigation going, have you guys caught the Halifax troll yet? Maybe you can get the FBI after him. Oh wait I forgot they don't have any jurisdiction in Canada. Looks like you guys are shit out of luck --Cochabamba 12:09, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- So what happens to the people the FBI catches, are they sent to Gitmo? --Kucinichforlife 12:20, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- Yeah they are and then the army rapes them up the ass with a broomstick --Edwards4pres 12:24, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- So why do you guys keep reverting the questions, could it be that there really is no FBI investigation and you are all lying. Looks like liberals aren't the only ones capable of deceit eh? --Cochabamba 13:03, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- So how come you guys don't have an article on cp:Conservative deceit? This is a conservative site and it is full of it. Are you going to send the FBI after me ;) --Mikegravelforpres 13:16, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- What's wrong Karajou, does the truth hurt? Send the FBI up to Halifax to get me asshole --Osamaobama 13:32, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- What's wrong, can't stomach dissenting views. Just expunge dissenting views from the public record. Welcome to 1984 --Ronpaulvandamn 13:57, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- Are you guys going to answer any questions or are you too scared? --Kucinichforlife 16:58, 1 November 2007 (EDT)
- Steve Carson is a hero! By the way, how is that FBI investigation going? Will the Feds catch Steve Carson? Please let us know!
- You know you guys are such hypocrites and I don't associate with hypocrites --SebastianValmont 18:19, 9 November 2007 (EST)
- Are you guys going to delete the page again, you are such cowards --Coldhandstara 18:23, 9 November 2007 (EST)
- Why do you delete the page TK, afraid of something? --Snuffaluffacus 18:31, 9 November 2007 (EST)
- Is it too embarrassing for you, there is no FBI investigation, just admit it --CecileCaldwell 22:14, 9 November 2007 (EST)
- Conservapedians are cowards, they'll never admit it, they'll just keep deleting the evidence. They can only hide it for so long though --Cruelintentions 23:45, 9 November 2007 (EST)
- Why don't you just answer the question when people ask you about the FBI rather than burning the evidence --Tara 16:19, 28 November 2007 (EST)
- (Block log); 18:33 . . TK (Talk | contribs) (blocked "User:Snuffaluffacus" with an expiry time of 5 years: Troll, sock of AmesG), Wrong again TK, it wasn't Ames .
Nice work, TK!
Gun Control Talk page
The talk page for gun control has been a burn magnet for much of late 2008. Partly because, like so many pages, it's full of garbage, and partly because, well, like the FBI incident, it's viral. In fact, the go-around of December 2008 involved (at last count) a paragraph being shallow-burned 13 times. This is more than the amount of mayhem that got the FBI Incident page started, but that was at a more innocent time. Sassing CP is now a much bigger industry.
In any case, Philip J. Rayment appears poised to archive the talk page, at a moment when the interesting material appears to be absent. To meliorate the loss of such an unfortunate occurrence, we have saved it here.
Further Help
You should make use of Internet archive sites. E.g. archive.org currently has copies of Andrew Schlafly's talk page from various points in 2007. However there are two caveats: (1) archiving is sporadic, so they might not have what you want (2) older archives disappear, so if they do have what you want, save a local copy for yourself while you can.