Conservapedia:Burning the Evidence
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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. | 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 | + | Fortunately, we have saved much of the burned material [[Conservapedia:Burning_the_Evidence/FBI_Talk|here]]. |
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=== Gun control talk page === | === Gun control talk page === | ||
Revision as of 23:02, 3 March 2009
This page is about evidence-burning at Conservapedia. For discussion of the more general topic, see this article.
Sometimes the administrators of Conservapedia 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.
Contents |
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, DeanS, Karajou, 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.
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.
Conservapedia commandments talk page
In late February to early March of 2009, an issue arose on the commandments talk page (don't bother looking) about whether various edits to Conservapedia constitute a violation of 18 USC 1030, the federal law against tampering with ("hacking") computers used in commerce, defense, and government functions. The powers that be insist that editing Conservapedia does indeed fall within the scope of this statute, a claim which apparently rests on whether the CP servers are "protected", which in turn depends on whether they are used in the "communications" industry. Needless to say, there are those who dispute this contention, and, needless to say, the CP sysops are hard at work deleting such expressions. A large deletion took place on 2 March, 2009, just prior to archiving the entire page and then deleting its content. This of course had the effect of making the removed material hard to find, though the talk page itself has not actually been deleted, so this isn't really a "deep burn". Nevertheless, we have saved the page here.
Other deep-burned pages that we have saved
User ForeverPeace was banned, came back as JeremyJCH, was abused further, and left this parting shot. It was deep-burned by Karajou at 23:20, 12 Feb 2009, with the comment "you are censored here, and your demands that we must be tolerant because we are Christian will not work."
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.