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

[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.