Conservapedia:Parthian shot/RodWeathers

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Essay:On the Present State of Conservapedian Defenses

Some people seemed dismayed at my leaving without a "parthian shot." Well, I'm afraid I cannot comply, and this declaration will have to suffice.

Conservapedia is continually under siege by vandals, liberals, and parodists, yet what do any of these accomplish? Vandals only prove their own immaturity, and are immediately reverted. Liberals waste their time arguing, until they comprehend the thoroughly stoic nature of conservapedia's administration, again accomplishing nothing. The most skilled of parodists only serve to benefit Conservapedia from the administration's standpoint, as they create content, purge those who fail to adopt the party line, and are incessantly sycophantic. At worst, they get rights, go on some silly spree, and it is all reverted within a few hours. For all intents and purposes, the liberals' war against Conservapedia has been solidly rebuffed.

And yet I fear there are serious cracks in Conservapedia's defenses, flaws which leave it vulnerable to much more serious tactics of assault than the aforementioned. Conservapedia's primary purpose is to be an educational resource, with accurate, diverse information. But what if a mischievous user, instead of linking images of Hitler and inserting silly insults, poisoned Conservapedia's articles? What if such a user inserted illusory facts into articles, quoted books never written by men never born, and cited fantastical statistics from studies never conducted? Imagine the glee such a person would feel at seeing Conservapedia's administrators using those very same statistics to refute sane individuals making reasonable arguments.

Yet here's the crux: such informational distortion could never be fixed. Why? Conservapedia's administration has an extremely limited field of expertise and, excepting the case of RJJenson, who does a disservice to his name by continuing here, drives away anyone and everyone with expertise. The user base itself is far too small to actually check articles for accuracy, and even then, how is niche knowledge to be differentiated from the absurd? The number of poisoned articles increase daily, and as they typically don't tread onto the obsessions with Obama and liberals, they will never come under your scrutiny.

But before you go on a reversion spree, rest assured, my articles are perfectly legitimate. As I've repeated needlessly many times, I came to Conservapedia to add starkly lacking articles on literature and some other areas of my expertise. Need there be any more proof of Conservapedia's failure than the total absence of articles of such critical cultural importance, more than two years on? So don't fear; RodWeathers' contributions are legitimate. Though I doubt you'll believe me, but invariably take down valuable articles in a characteristic purge. Why would I undermine myself when Andy was so eager to give me block rights, and would invariably have made me sysop had I been at home when he emailed me with his paranoid information request? (Edit and upload rights improved my ability to create valuable articles, though for a brief time, but Andy chose to begin with block rights, unsolicited, which in an instant turned me from a credit to the site to a menace. With the legitimacy this afforded, I used email, TK's most favoured of media, to turn away as many sane and reasonable users as I possibly could, especially kids. Ever had a conversation with a blocked kid's parents? They end up horrified by what Conservapedia is.)

Nay, it's not this account that you need worry about, but the others, which I use to undermine Conservapedia as a resource from day to day. You don't know who they are, and will never know. I doubt you'll ever manage to block so much as one of them, as I'm quite careful to keep them all on different proxies. I'll give you hint by which you might know them, however: they add content to articles, and sometimes reference sources. Sometimes the material they add is factual, or mostly factual, just stretching the truth. More often, it is the fruits of fancy, spanning countless fields of human knowledge which are completely beyond the Conservapedia administration's expertise.

That's why this is not a "parthian shot." I never parted, and never shall. RodWeathers is immortal; he is immune to your poisons, impervious to your weapons. I can never die, and my changes will never be undone. If you even attempt to do so, I know the result: you'll take out legitimate users while failing to take out the illegitimate, and will utterly fail to spot my additions, compounding daily in the form of Operation Enduring Legacy. Andy continually fails to discern parodist fundamentalists from real fundamentalists; how could he possibly differentiate between parody reality and reality itself? He lives in a parody, which explains why he does not find it at all amusing.

So ends an era, yet another has just begun,

- Rod "Publius" Weathers