McCain volunteer Ashley Todd recants

[james_davis_nicoll]

McCain volunteer admits race-baiting fable about being assaulted by a tall black Obama supporter was in fact a lie.

Note that nobody is suggesting John McCain personally urged the young woman to go out and lie for his cause. He just would have benefited from it had it worked.

John Moody, executive vice president at Fox New: "If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain's quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting."

Huh. Ashley Todd's wikipedia entry appears to have been deleted because she isn't notable enough to warrant one.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

dd-b: I understand the point of "better", of course; what's the point of "fewer"?

Doesn't that question kind of answer itself? Given that there are only so many people editing Wikipedia and only so many hours in the day, it seems trivially obvious to me that "better" necessarily implies "fewer".

On the whole, I think the current editors are doing a pretty good job of finding the right balance there.

-- Ross Smith

[lostwanderfound.livejournal.com]

Given that there are only so many people editing Wikipedia and only so many hours in the day, it seems trivially obvious to me that "better" necessarily implies "fewer".

Umm, no. That only follows if the editors are assumed to be spending significant amounts of their time editing the pages that would be deleted.

Getting rid of trivial articles (which are usually also of lousy standard) raises the mean quality of articles on Wiki; it does nothing to raise the quality of any individual article that remains. Yes, deleting the trivial articles would theoretically narrow the number of articles that the editors need to fix, but I think the argument of the inclusionists is that the editors should be concentrating on the important articles anyway. Leave the trivia to quietly rot on its own; put in a Wiki rule that a page that isn't visited for x time gets deleted or somesuch.

The "average" quality of Wiki articles is irrelevant; what's important is the quality of the articles that people (other than the creators) actually read. The quality of those articles is affected very little by the quantity of trivial vanity pages.

If you hit the "random" button, you should expect trivia; that's the way the world is.

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

Not only that, "editors" are not necessarily fungible. There are doubtless people out there who would gladly devote hours of time to honing individual articles on every single Pokemon creature to a brilliant polish; but if they're told that such articles aren't "notable" enough for Wikipedia, they'll be much less interested in editing anything else.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Creating "fewer" isn't helping. Creating "better" would be helping, but lots of the editors don't seem to be doing that. There seem to be large herds of roving editors who pop up any time a new article appears to instantly tag it for deletion. This is annoying, discouraging to contributors, and a complete waste of time.

Nobody cares about the average quality of a randomly selected set of Wikipedia articles; it's the ones people actually find when looking for information that they care about, and those are not randomly selected.

As has already been pointed out, a mediocre article on a trivial subject just sitting there is *harmless*. Having that mediocre article on the trivial subject is *better* than having *nothing* on that trivial subject, if anybody ever looks for it.