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]

Oh, they actively tried to benefit from it afterwards though: before she confessed it was reported that both McCain and Palin had called her to offer their support.

Of course, that it was an obvious hoax to everyone but a complete idiot, or College Republicans (but I repeat myself) further cements my belief that the McCain/Mooselini campaign is like a circus clown car: just when you're convinced nothing more funny can possibly come out of it, they prove you wrong.

She ha[d/s] a myspace page

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

"Lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her cloths off, but its better if you do."

(http://74.125.45.104/search?q=cache:dNPAoAhExjwJ:profile.myspace.com/index.cfm%3Ffuseaction%3Duser.viewprofile%26friendID%3D8513159+www.myspace.com/rabbitrocker&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a)

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a Wikipedia admin, I'd certainly support its deletion as a biography of a non-notable person. Had the lie had legs in the Tawana Bradley tradition, that would be another thing entirely.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

How exactly does Wikipedia decide "notability"? Because I've seen a hell of a lot of pop culture trivia…

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Oh, dear Lord, that's the subject of some of our most intense internal disagreements. There are standards of notability, which like most standards are subject to interpretation; and there are always those who want to push the envelope one way or the other. I am of the evil tribe termed "deletionists" who think there's too much crap about recent nonsense; and believes in fewer but finer articles; ideally, reducing the total number of articles in the English-language Wikipedia from 2.7 million to 2 million or fewer.

The other tendency, of course, is referred to as "inclusionists." I don't know of any reliable indicator to predict which way any given person will lean, aside from a tendency for the youngest editors to think that any content that was on television after they were three is central to the knowledgebase of humanity.

[burger-eater.livejournal.com]

The main reason I go to wikipedia is to dig up information about old TV shows.

[roseembolism.livejournal.com]

I'm beginning to feel like the McCain campaign is like towards the end of one of those fantasy movies, when the Big Bad brings out his uberweapon and it fails, his legions of Terror are running Scared, and his monsters have been taken down by the clumsy ministral.

I also have this image of McCain's campaign manager screaming "INCONCEIVABLE!"

I mean, hasn't anyone in the McCaine campaign read the Evil Overlord's List?

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Really. That's what it's FOR, dammit.

(Obviously I'm of an inclusionist mindset.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Let's hide the List from them a little longer, shall we?

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Aha! I have *finally* laid hands on an articulate, sane, deletionist who might, possibly, be willing to talk to me.

I don't get it. What's the point of deletionism? You say "fewer but better" -- but what's actually happening is that energy that could be put into "better" is being spent on deletion fights, and it seems like most of the articles I go there to read are carrying the dreaded "deletion" tag.

I understand the point of "better", of course; what's the point of "fewer"? Wikipedia is online, and volunteer-written, and does not have the constraints of paper encyclopedias.

Feel free to take it to email if you think a private discussion would go better; I'm trivially easy to find, have had the same email since 1999 now roughly. And of course I can't compel you to discuss it at all. I'm hoping there's some kind of point to the other side that I could maybe actually understand, really I am.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Because so many of the existing articles are crappier than they could be; but if you try randomly browsing, you can't find articles to edit for having to wade through the spam and the "my garage band has a MySpace" junk. This planet has six billion people on it; our servers have finite capacity; we CAN'T cover everything. (Read the Wikipedia article with the shortcut Wikipedia:WECANT.)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I had kind of assumed that ``notability'' was code for ``does not make any reference to Usenet, which we are busy reinventing in the argument pages''.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Of course -- the B was backwards, she cut it into herself while looking in a mirror.

[zeborah]

Random browsing is not the optimal method for finding articles to edit, but there are plenty of other methods. I've never had trouble finding them; the problem is making myself stop when it's only a couple of hours after bedtime.

(I've no problem with deleting spam and garage bands, mind; but deletionists generally don't stop there.)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Thank you for asking that!

(I've wondered, myself.)

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Who the hell randomly browses?

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

Given their current aptitude at doing, well anything, remotely competent, they'd probably get everything backwards anyway.

[wldrose.livejournal.com]

I do

ash

[(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

[nojay.livejournal.com]

14-year-old me and the local library's copy of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica -- the library staff had to use the Jaws Of Life and heavy lifting gear to separate us so they could close up shop in the evening.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

The idea of the McCain campaign sticking self destruct devices around the place given McCain's long record of having complex machinery explode when he's nearby is leaving me with some mildly conflicted feelings.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[nexstarman.livejournal.com]

My thoughts exactly.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

Me. More accurately I go to wikipedia to look something up, see a link from the page that looks interesting, and after about fifteen minutes could end up anywhere.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

I do that too, but I don't consider it randomly browsing: that's browsing, but not random because I chose specifically where I'm going next. I mean getting a random page to pop up.

In any case, I've never had one of the crap pages pop up except when I've specifically went looking for said crap page because someone pointed it out somewhere.

[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.

[catherineomega.livejournal.com]

I liked this.

[(Anonymous)]

She's from College Station, Tx. If this were one of the later letters of the alphabet, say S or W, she might not have known what it looked like. In College Station they learn their ABCs. And stop there.


William Hyde

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I wonder why deletionists bother, given the size of the namespace and the power of internet-scale indexing?

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

It's not as much as the exploding, as with the pilot error.

[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.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

This one time he was on an aircraft carrier, and it caught fire and exploded.

[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.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

LOL