^ It isn't intentionally a joke, no, but the trajectory of this story so far does remind me a bit of the "Pastor Donnie Davies" hoax back in January. In both cases, an absurd overreaction in the blogosphere led to something not seriously expected or intended to be a Big Thing becoming precisely that.
Conservapedia was created in November 2006 by Andrew Schlafly as a "history project" for 58 high-school age homeschoolers in New Jersey affiliated with the ultraconservative Eagle Forum founded by his mother, Phyllis Schlafly. On February 20, it was picked up by a blogger on the network ScienceBlogs, spread rapidly through that network, was picked up by Wonkette February 22, and from there proceeded to spread through both the science and political blogospheres. If you look at Conservapedia's banned IPs log page, you can easily enough see the result: they went from 2 bannings in their first 4 months to 60 in the next 11 days once the blogosphere picked the story up. Ironically, as a result of all the subsequent international media attention, they're now in a much better position to present themselves as a potential "conservative answer to Wikipedia".
I doubt that will ever happen though, because now that they've been "outed", and given their "open editorial" policy, it's likely only a question of time before the extent of the vandalism outpaces their admin capacity. And if they limit who can edit, they'll never get much beyond what they have right now, which is a rather puny collection of mostly 1-5 sentence entries.
I do find many of the entries, vandalized or not, pretty silly, but I also find the overreaction to it pretty lame.
to Conservapedia!!
