I was a Conservapedia Administrator

Andy Schlafly

The more you know someone, the more that you come to love them. Unless you hate them.

Andy is the son of a well-known (in America) activist, Phyllis Schlafly, a laywer, and also a homeschool teacher. If that last one seems a contradiction, in America it seems that a fair proportion of home­school­ing is done in a classroom setting as arranged by groups of parents.

I don't hate Andy Schlafly, the owner of Con­serva­pedia. However, like every­body else, Andy has his faults. Various people have picked up on his faults and criticised and mocked him for them. However, I believe that there is one fault that stands above all others, and without which many of the other faults would not be an issue. And that fault is that Andy is unwilling to heed the advice of others.

Submitting to Wise Counsel

Andy is a Catholic, and it is a biblical injunction to submit to wise counsel ("Where there is no guidance the people fall, But in abundance of counselors there is victory." (Proverbs 11:14). Also that "As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another" (Proverbs 27:17). And we should "Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." (Ephesians 5:21).). Of course, one must decide which counsel is worth listening to and which should be ignored.

Everyone is influenced by their worldviews, and many allow their worldviews to control what they think. I know of a transport "expert" in my city who is often quoted in the media, because he has something to say about public transport and he has a piece of paper that says he's a qualified transport planner. However, as an actual transport planner of over 30 years myself (scheduling trains), I know that much of what he says is nonsense, and much of that is clearly driven by his anti-privatisation ideology.

So although in principle we should concede to experts, if their views are not expert views but ideology-based views, we have no obligation to concede to them if we believe their ideology to be in error.

Evolution is based on a belief in naturalism, and creation is based on a belief in God. So it is understandable that a creationist would not take much notice of an evolutionary scientist. But, for example, a creationist who dismisses fellow creationists out of hand has no such excuse.

This is not to suggest, of course, that we should always ignore someone with a different ideology. It depends on whether their advice is based on their ideology, or whether they are simply passing on factual information.

I tried to talk to Andy about this, but it fell on deaf ears. My letter to him, and his response, is reproduced in appendix E.

Examples of Andy not Heeding Advice

I document here several examples of Andy ignoring or rejecting the advice of others whom he should be heeding.

Pope John Paul II's Comment on Evolution

Andy claimed that Pope John Paul II said that "Evolution is more than a hypothesis", whereas other sources had the Pope saying that "Evolution is more than one hypothesis". Actually, the speech was in French, so the real dispute was not what the Pope said, but which was the correct translation. According to various web-sites, including Catholic web-sites, the official Catholic translation in an English-language Catholic newspaper had the Pope translated as "Evolution is more than one hypothesis", but that they subsequently changed their translation to "Evolution is more than a hypothesis". Another user and I both produced evidence in the form of various authorities saying that the translation was changed. Andy, however, continued to insist that the claims that the translation was changed were false claims made by evolutionists. When he was challenged to produce evidence, he merely said that he'd spent too much time on the issue and that we should all move on.

Richard Lenski

When Andy raised the idea of writing to sciencist Richard Lenski asking him to release the data backing his claims of E.Coli bacteria "evolving" a new function, two of his own Administrators, both also young-Earth creationists (CPAdmin1 and me) both advised him not to. No admin­istra­tor expressed support for the letter. Yet his response was to go ahead and write to Lenski.

Archaeopteryx

In 1983, a number of scientists, led by famous British astronomer Sir Edmund Hoyle, declared that the feather impressions on archaeopteryx fossils had been faked. Almost every other scientist who has investigated the case believes that the feather impressions are real. This is supported by evidence that was not available to Hoyle and his team.

Leading young-Earth creationists have listed this claim as one that creationists should not make. Despite pointing this out to Andy, and pointing out that a creationary anatomist had declared the feather impressions to be real (Hoyle's team comprised astronomers, mathemathicians, a physicist, a medical doctor, and a photographer), Andy would not be convinced that the feather impresssions were genuine.

Piltdown Hoax

Piltdown Man was a supposed intermediate fossil, an 'ape-man', "found" in a quarry in England in 1912. After being touted for many years as evidence of the evolution of man, it was exposed in 1953 as a hoax. The person or persons perpetrating this hoax have been the subject of numerous investigations, and various names have been put forward.

Creationists have claimed that the hoax should have been exposed much sooner, but it was accepted as genuine because it fitted the evolutionary beliefs of the scientists studying it, and they therefore did not apply sufficient scepticism towards it.

However, nobody doubts that the scientists studying it were themselves victims of the hoax, and not perpetrators of it. Andy, however, believed that the scientists studying and promoting it did so knowing that the fossil was a hoax.

In an e-mail to Andy in September 2007 (see appendices), I pointed out this principle of submitting to the counsel of the leading creationists, the people who would be only too happy to claim that the promoters of the fossil were themselves knowingly deceiving the public if they thought that to be the case, but they did not so think. However, Andy was not to be moved, and continued to claim that the hoax was perpetrated by all the scientists involved, despite having no support for that position.

(Interestingly, in June 2008 he made similar claims on his talk page, and after I again pointed out (on his talk page) that he doesn't have the support of other creationists for that claim, he modified the claim to "deliberate ignorance" on the part of the scientists.)

Learn together

In an e-mail to the Special Discussion Group on 22^nd May, 2007, Andy suggested that Conservapedia editor 'Learn together' and three other editors had potential as admin­istra­tors. Some possible concerns were raised, generally related to him being new (having only joined in early May) and others deserving it more.

Andy again mentioned Learn together as a potential sysop on 25^th July, 2007, but nothing came of it then. His name was raised again in December 2007, at which time seven of the senior admin­istra­tors supported his appointment—sometimes repeatedly—as an admin­istra­tor. Andy had reservations, but made comments like "But I defer to the consensus here" and "I'll defer to Dan and others here about Learn Together". He also put Learn together's name to the Student Panel (which supposedly governed Con­serva­pedia) and they had no objection to him. But Andy still had reservations, so despite saying that he would go along with the consensus, Andy declined to promote Learn together.

(He was considered again in March 2008 following the departure of Iduan, and this time there were discussions about checking a candidate's bona fides, but nothing happened. Then on 13^th April 2008 he was promoted almost out of the blue, and without any check on his bona fides.)

Barack Obama

The issue that caused the biggest controversy and which was the beginning of the end for me on Con­serva­pedia was over the content of the article about Barack Obama. I discuss this in chapter 8.

Any excuse will do

After that, I'm not sure how much merit there is in mentioning other problems, but some that should be mentioned are denigration, going off on tangents, and finding any excuse he can to try and win an argument, even if it contradicted things he said at other times.

One of his claims was that Con­serva­pedia was a "meritocracy", where people were granted rights according to how much they had earned them. And this indeed is how he works—except when it suits him to do otherwise. This showed in several ways, including resisting repeated requests for further rights, such as night-edit rights, from editors who contributed enormously to the site, whilst granting such rights to others who had contributed very little.

Granting rights

To some extent this lack of consistency was understandable. The concern with granting rights was due to concerns about whether the editors were genuine, or were trying to get such rights in order to vandalise. So if an editor was personally known to Andy or someone he trusted (such as a senior admin­istra­tor), then there need be no concerns about their genuineness. Thus an editor I vouched for got upload rights (the ability to copy pictures to Con­serva­pedia) despite having relatively few edits. Yet apart from the editor for whom I got upload rights, Andy made an admin­istra­tor of a person he personally knew before this person had made any edits, and whom only ever made two edits! So much for a meritocracy. Then there was the case of the editor who partially supported Andy in his attack on Richard Lenski, to whom Andy gave night edit rights after only two edits. The editor turned out to also be a holocaust revisionist.

An ongoing sore spot with me was the night-editing shut-down, which prevented most editors from editing at night time—U.S. night time, that is. This restriction didn't affect admin­istra­tors, and Andy was also able to grant night-editing rights to other editors. But this seemed to happen according to whether or not Andy liked them, not on the basis of a meritocracy nor on how likely they were to not vandalise.

The case of AlanE is a good example.

• Early May 2007: AlanE started editing on Con­serva­pedia.
• Early June 2007: Andy granted him the right to edit when editing was turned off overnight. He told the Special Discussion Group (appendix B) that "AlanE appears to be a good editor from Australia, meaning he is especially valued for the time zone benefit".
• Early August 2007: An admin­istra­tor was telling AlanE that he was required to have a valid e-mail account. He couldn't get it working so said that he would open a second account, named "Guddle", to see if he could get it to work on that account.³ He made one edit as Guddle, then stopped contributing.
• Late September 2007: Andy removed ElanE's editing right, as part of a cleanup of inactive editors.
• Early July 2008: AlanE resumes editing, under the username "Guddle".
• Early August 2008: AlanE resumes editing under the AlanE name, and discontinues using the "Guddle" name.
• Mid-late August 2008: AlanE mentions on his talk page that his absence was due to ill-health.
• Mid-late August 2008: Andy posts a message on AlanE's talk page that he needs to close editing early that night.
• Early October 2008: AlanE e-mails Andy with a request to have night-editing rights again.

However, Andy is not not convinced. Part of his response is "I'm not encouraged by this. He's used a sock, and his contributions are not impressive. For example, this edit is simply bizarre: http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Rhodes_Scholar&diff=prev&oldid=523524"

I point out that the edit, to the Rhodes Scholar article, was perfectly legitimate: "He changed "athletic" to "sports". The scholarship is for /sports/, not /athletics/, which is only a subset of sports. That is, there is absolutely /nothing/ bizarre about the edit at all; it is a perfectly proper edit correcting a mistake in the article!"

Andy also tried to decide what hours AlanE could edit: "As I understand it, [his location] is 15 hours ahead of me, so the closure of editing there is from 3pm to 11pm. AlanE says he can edit before 8am, and is not hindered there. Also, presumably he stays up after 11pm too.". In fact, as I pointed out, depending on daylight saving in Australia and America, AlanE would be 14 to 16 hours ahead of Andy, meaning that at times he would have to stay up after midnight to edit, which is not likely for someone who is normally up before 8 a.m.

But that's not good enough for Andy, so he invents another reason to deny AlanE edit rights: "One serious risk is that vandals discovered that someone had night editing privileges and contacted him to try to get them restored for nefarious purposes.". It takes a lot to convince Andy when his mind is made up. Apparently being ill is not a good enough reason for being away, and my explanation of his "bizarre" edit was obviously not convincing: "AlanE hasn't persuasively explained his absence or why he needs night editing restored. I've found some of his edits to be bizarre at best."

Given that AlanE had made over 400 edits since returning, with no blocks, and at least three admin­istra­tors supporting giving him edit rights, one has to wonder what it takes for an editor to be considered "legitimate": "We've given out night editing freely to clearly legitimate editors. AlanE (and HelpJazz) haven't reached that level of comfort needed to given them overnight access. We're not losing much by withholding night editing from them for now.". Given that HelpJazz had also been absent for some time presumably because he was not given the night-edit rights he was promised, that last claim is unfounded also.

Contradictions

Also in the Lenski discussion mentioned above, Andy was taken to task for criticising Lenski's statistical analysis, but not proposing a better analysis. His reply included the comment, "One need not propose an alternative, or a solution, in order to identify a flaw."¹ But when I asked a few months later for evidence to support his claim regarding Australia that "99% of gun purchases and uses are for defensive purposes", he avoided my request for evidence by trying to put the onus on me, with "If you doubt my 99% estimate, then propose your own. But don't insist on supporting gun control while not forming an estimate about that ratio. That would be the ultimate in irrationality.". When I declined to provide a figure (although I did give a general idea of my own), he responded with "Jumping on someone else's estimates while refusing to provide your own is a sign of bullying rather than open mind.²", which completely contradicts his statement in the Lenski dispute!

Denigration and tangents

When Andy felt that he was being criticised, he would frequently denigrate the person, and also often raise unrelated questions in the apparent hope of finding something to criticise them for. A shocking example of this is the following exchange starting with a question about Andy's mother Phyllis:⁴

Another example sees Andy seemingly say that he isn't actually interested in Conservapedia being a general encyclopaedia.⁵

Unfortunately, hundreds more such examples could be found.

1. http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk:Flaws_in_Richard_Lenski_Study&diff=492631&oldid=492623
2. http://www.conservapedia.com/index.php?title=Talk:Gun_control&oldid=578278
3. His talk page
4. http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Essay:Conservapedia_Awards#Phyllis_Schlafly
5. http://www.conservapedia.com/Talk:Main_Page#Focus.3F