Talk:Computer shell
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The "See also" section seems a bit overdone. Might want to trim that down a bit. DavidB4 (talk) 12:48, 30 December 2015 (EST)
- OK, I've cleaned it up. Now, as a full-fledged editor at Conservapedia, you're ready for "the talk".
- There's an enormous amount of garbage hereâcomplete articles and huge "see also" sections and the like, put in about a year ago by User:TheAmericanRedoubt, commonly known as "TAR". Basically, he was a survivalist, and attempted to turn the place into a survivalist blog. He filled a huge number of pages with the sort of stuff that you saw. He apparently believed that we should all quit our jobs, cash in our assets to buy guns and bullets (that's why you see so many pages on those topics), and move to "free states" like Idaho, living "off the grid" to survive the apocalypse.
- A number of people complained about his behavior on the Community Portal, sections 16 et. seq.; note my lengthy complaint in section 18.
- He was given block rights. He basically terrorized the whole place for several months. The admins, who should have been trying to keep CP true to its mission as a resource for students, did nothing.
- He plastered a huge block of stuff in many places (I think I once counted the same block in 45 places) in various article pages that had nothing to do with him. You can see a sample on my talk page at sections 23 et. seq.
- Then he disappeared. People asked about him, and Cons claimed to be in some kind of communication with him, and that he had indicated that he would come back in September 2015. He didn't. So I am now trying to clean up the mess.
- After all is said and done, it is often hard to predict when people will start and stop editing a wiki or return from a break in editing. And of course, if multiple people use an account, it makes the task even harder. :) Conservative (talk) 00:23, 31 December 2015 (EST)
I knew I'd seen that block around before. Thanks for the info, I'll keep an eye out for it. Is there no way to look at his/her contributions page and hunt down all of these?--DavidB4 (talk) 15:00, 6 January 2016 (EST)
- There's a lot of stuff. Looking at his contributions is pointless, because he made so many of them per article. What I do is search for one of the "code phrases" that he liked to use. The one I use currently is "nanny state". He used it a lot. That phrase simply has no business in any serious wiki, except perhaps in an article about how to write inflammatory essays. Also, look in Category:Investments in Tangibles and Category:Survivalism. The first of these has a lot of beans/bullets/batteries nonsense, with more code phrases.
- When you find one of his articles, there's still a lot more work to be done. Look at the edit history. You will typically see a block of 7 or 8 edits by him, followed by whatever normal stuff people may have added afterwards. The people who came afterwards may or may not have cleaned up the tar. In any case, you have to do "compare selected versions" operations to find out what he did, separate the wheat from the chaff (he also made some constructive edits, usually involving putting things in categories), and repair things carefully.
- Why the Conservapedia admins allowed him to do all this is a mystery. The folks over at RW seem to think there was some kind of link-spam hanky-panky, and that he reneged on some agreement. I have no idea about the details. And it was somehow related to one James Wesley Rawles. TAR himself (that is, User:TheAmericanRedoubt) is a different person. And his real name isn't hard to find, but I forget.
Sounds like fun--not. It certainly does look like he's gotten around. I don't do a lot of revising others' work, since I feel like I'm saying what they did isn't good enough (though I know this isn't really true) so I probably will not go hunting for TAR stuffin the near future, but if I find it, I'll see what I can do. Perhaps I should add TAR hunting to the list of things to do on here....sometime. --DavidB4 (talk) 09:09, 7 January 2016 (EST)