Wikipedia:Dead rat
 | This is an essay on the deletion policy. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Demonstrating that one bug or error has been fixed is about as useful as waving a dead rat when the rats are the problem. |
Sometimes, whether in deletion debates or elsewhere, one editor responds to criticisms that something has errors by triumphantly fixing a small problem. This resembles responding to the complaint that a building has rats by killing a rat and triumphantly waving it around by its tail. The rat is dead. Waving a dead rat by the tail is fun for the person waving the rat, but it may not be fun for anyone else in the vicinity. Rodents are social animals. Where there is one rat, there are more. The dead rat says nothing about the number of remaining rats. (Of course not. Dead rats can't talk.) A dead rat only means that the building is ratty.
Waving a dead rat illustrates that there were and are rats, not that there are no rats.