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

[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.