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

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

If there's that much total crap (which I have to say is very contrary to my experience in random browsing), why aren't the editors working on eliminating that crap, rather than arguing about whether (for example) James Nicoll is sufficiently notable to deserve an article? I totally agree that spam and such really should be removed.

I say again, over half of the articles I find on Wikipedia that provide useful information I'm actively searching for are marked as under consideration for deletion. This is very discouraging! It looks very much like the editors are trying to take away most of what makes Wikipedia valuable to me!

And 30 seconds with the back of an envelope tells me that the server capacity issue is specious. Disk is cheap, and people type slowly. The "We Can't" article is content-free, it simply cites the world population and asserts Wikipedia can't cover everything; it never actually addresses server capacity. I have sitting at my left elbow enough disk space for a 50-word article on every single person currently alive on earth. It cost me less than 500 dollars, over a year ago.

The question, of course, isn't whether you have the resources to cover everything; the question is whether the resources you do have should be used removing good articles because somebody doesn't think the subject is important enough. *That's* the waste of resources, especially if, as you say, Wikipedia is overrun with articles that are blatant spam and other complete wastes of space.

I just went through 20 random articles and found nothing I'd call spam; three things that wouldn't get into the Encyclopedia Britannica (a small band with multiple records out, a small Japanese radio station, and "Laughercize"). And that last one has the "no cites" tag but in fact cites a magazine article and a CBC documentary, with links to online forms of both. No discussion on the talk page about that yet.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

And that last one has the "no cites" tag but in fact cites a magazine article and a CBC documentary, with links to online forms of both.

When CBC reported that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans had released a report earlier this year concluding that oops, they'd actually sort of overlooked up to 30,000 whales and that Canadian bowhead populations were, in fact, very healthy, I was the one who included that info on the article on bowheads. Including a reference to the CBC news website with the story.

Guess what: "citation needed" last time I looked at it. I'm really of the opinion that people are doing that as a form of intellectual masturbation, because they have to be getting some pleasure out of it.

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

While I'm sure it doesn't explain *all* of them, I'm convinced there's a large core of people who are essentially "wreckers", enjoying tearing down things other people are trying to build, who have settled on these rules-lawyering games on Wikipedia as the way to get their jollies.

[zeborah]

<looks it up> Looks like there was some confusion because the reference was in external links rather than being footnoted from the sentence it referred to. Someone deleted it from the external links (presumably thinking it wasn't an important enough link to be included, and not realising it was the source for your statement) and so the citation needed link was added later.

I've fixed it now. If it's useful in future, I generally cite sources using the <ref>(source)</ref> tags right after the sentence they belong to -- that creates a numbered footnote linked to the (source) details in the references lists.