Everything you've ever wanted to know about Snopes

Snopes was founded and is operated by just two people, husband and wife, David and Barbara Mikkelson:

Snopes receives 6.3 million site visits a month, according to media measurement company Quantcast....

"A lot of people don't realize," David, 48, says wearily, "that our site is just two people."

Working out of their living room....

It's morphed into its own verb — Snopesed, Snopesing, Snopesifying — part of an information-overloaded election where stuff needs to be fact-checked, where believing everyone is lying seems more like smarts than paranoia. "I was Snopesing about last night," a user on a parenting message board writes in wonder, "and I discovered that the bulk of [ Cindy McCain's] good deeds are more than just right-wing wonkery."

It's a one-sentence rebuttal to even the bat-craziest of e-mail forwards: Dude, Snopesify that junk....

Their site takes its name from a particularly pernicious family peopling a William Faulkner trilogy — and papering academia with hundreds of doctoral dissertations.

A few years ago, David left his job as a computer programmer to join his wife in full-time myth-busting (income is from ad space purchased on the site)....

The Mikkelsons...consider themselves apolitical....

But they couldn't overlook another query, not after it was e-mailed by dozens of concerned readers. Branded as a series of Palin quotes, the document contained such ramblers as, "God made dinosaurs ... so that when they died and became petroleum products we, in his perfect image, could use them in our snow machines, pickup trucks and fishing boats."

This text, as you, dear elite intellectual reader, may have suspected, is meant to be a joke. The Mikkelsons traced it to a blog labeling it as satire, not once but three separate times.

And yet, the e-mails came: "Does Sarah Palin really believe that dinosaurs are lizards of the Devil?"

I think I'll Snopes the Mikkelsons to see if their story is true.