Talk:Valerie Wilson (lottery winner)

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These comments are taken from the Valerie Wilson disambiguation page. The anon editor who continues to deny that Ms. Wilson has won two $1,000,000 jackpots has failed to respond with any rationale that addresses the point, and these comments are duplicated here so that he or she will not fail to see them. Unschool 21:00, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Valerie Wilson

Hello. I must say, I'm a bit puzzled by your persistent efforts to change the entry on Ms. Wilson. Your history seems to be that of a responsible editor, with regular interest in lottery issues. (I thought your edits to Rebecca Paul were well-advised, and I hope you can continue to improve that article, to which I could only devote a limited amount of time.) But with this stuff on Valerie Wilson, I just don't get it. The news was carried on CNN, other US networks, even the BBC! It was a pretty unexpected thing, and worthy of mentioning.

Your choice of words—that is, to break her prize down into the way it will be awarded—misses the point. As both citations indicate, she won a $1,000,000 jackpot. The fact that it is broken up like this is not at all unusual. Whenever—as I'm sure you know, as an apparent lottophile—someone whens a big jackpot, they never get a check for the amount mentioned in the news. If they win even $100,000,000, they're either going to get the total amount broken up over the course of twenty or more years, or (as seems increasingly common), they will get a one-time check for much less (having been reduced both by taxes and by the rules which lower the winnings if not taken as an annuity).

The point is, there is nothing deceitful in referring to Ms. Wilson as a person who won a million-dollar prize twice. Because that's exactly what happened. I am curious as to what your take is on this. Unschool 19:07, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I live in NY state; I delivered lottery magazines for over 8 1/2 years. Since NY retired "Tax-Free Million" in 2000, there has not been a "true" million-dollar scratch prize offered by the NY Lottery. Tax-Free Million was lump-sum; the check (after withholdings) was for exactly $1 million, so the actual prize was more than $1.5 million.

NO lottery/sweepstakes etc winner should ever be forced to receive annuity payments. Ms Wilson, in both cases, was forced to receive her "million-dollar" prize in 20 annual payments. Since she was already being paid through an annuity; IMO it made no sense for her to play for another annuity. She should be trying her luck on Mega Millions, which has a cash option. For whatever reason, NY allows the cash/annuity choice on Mega Millions, but not on its scratch games.

Annuity-only prizes should be boycotted (including "lifetime" prizes).

BTW the cash value is not "less" than the annuity; the lump sum represents the present-day value of future money (ie inflation). 216.179.123.145 13:51, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I remain puzzled by your persistance in this matter. Did she win a $1,000,000 jackpot? For as long as I have been playing lotteries (since about 1974 or 1975), it has been commonplace to refer to winning a $1,000,000 prize—even when paid as an annuity—as a "jackpot". Indeed, all three of the citations (MSNBC, CBS, and the BBC) refer to her winnings as exactly that—a $1,000,000 jackpot.

Indeed, it was not until the onset of Lotto games—which I did not encounter until many years later—that anyone ever actually received a check for anything close to $1,000,000, yet many dozens of people, maybe hundreds of people, were regarded as having won a million dollars.

This is obviously very important to you, so I do not want to blow off your concerns, so I'm asking you to explain why we should write this the way one particular anonymous Wikipedia editor wishes it to be written, and not the way every reputable news source—as well as the lotteries themselves—wish it to be written? Unschool 16:22, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I made my comments over on Valerie Wilson before seeing your comments here.

So from what I gather here, you simply dislike annuities. A very respectable opinion, I have no problem with that. But when you state, "NO lottery/sweepstakes etc winner should ever be forced to receive annuity payments," I am quite puzzled. No one should be forced to play the lottery, but, once you decide to play, hey—those are the rules. Look, I believe that the slam-dunk has almost ruined professional basketball (and truly would have destroyed it, had the three-point shot not been introduced). But do I have the right to complain after I buy my ticket that the game would be better if they made the slam-dunk illegal? Of course not. That's the game that I paid for, and that's the way it is. Period.

You say that Ms. Wilson should have been playing another game. I say, it's her bloody choice! Who are you and I to tell her that she played the wrong game? I'm guessing she's happy that she played the game she played, and it's pretty arrogant to tell her that she played the wrong game. Oh, I'm quite sure that your analysis of the merits of each game is correct—I'm willing to acknowledge you as an expert on lotteries (oh, and by the way, thanks for that explanation of the reduced size of the cash winnings—I never understood that), but I am not willing to grant you the power to say what I or Ms. Wilson or Mr. Whipple should do.

I think you are clearly engaged (though perhaps unintentionally) in a personal campaign to "clean up" the language on lotteries as used in Wikipedia. My friend, that is not your place. Both the prohibitions on POV and OR apply here. You need to keep your personal feelings out of this; your passion for the subject is blinding you to the POV that you are imposing. I ask you to take a step back, and let some of us who (frankly) don't give a damn about the subject offer a small amount of constructive criticism.

I'm not going to revert this minute. I'd like to give you a chance to respond. Talk to you tomorrow. Unschool 16:43, 9 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm just taking my comments from your anon talk page and placing them here, so that the whole conversation is at one place. Since your IP changes from day to day, it seemed to make the most sense to me. Unschool 15:04, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

I see that you have once again edited without responding to the comments that I have made. I believe that I have made some cogent points, and your failure to respond to those points could easily be construed as an indication of bad faith. I have explained why I agree with the rest of the world, you have only stated that you feel that no one should have to take their lottery winnings as an annuity. I'm willing to grant you this point, but your feeling about that issue has nothing to do with the writing of this article.

At this time, I am going to change this language to reflect the language unanimously used in the citations, as well as by lottery officials. If you revert this without rational explanation, I will be forced to regard it as vandalism. Unschool 20:46, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Notability

I think that the issue of notability is a reasonable one to raise. I think that Ms. Wilson passes muster, albeit not by a great margin, for the following reasons:

• The fact that something happened to her that is incredibly, incredibly rare—so rare that, if you were to ask a statistician the odds of it happening, it would be expected to never happen to anyone on the earth, even if everyone played the lottery every week for a hundred years. No, it's not a huge deal, it's not a notable accomplishment, but it is of interest to many of us.
• The second thing is one that I heard about when this first hit the news, but not much since. At the time she won the lottery, the saga of Joe Wilson's wife was very big—it was an issue in the election campaign going on. And this woman had a name that made it sound like she might be Joe Wilson's wife. Though she was better known as Valerie Plame, Mr. Wilson and his wife were (and, as far as I know, still are) encouraging the use of "Valerie Wilson" to refer to her. So I believe that it is our responsibility as a source of information to make it clear to anyone who might possibly wonder, today or years from now, that these are two different women.

Now it could be argued that it is not necessary to give this deli worker her own page, that all we need to do is to have a disambiguation page that mentions both women. And I would agree 100% with that. For a while, that's what we had. But someone came along and said something about Wiki style that required that a disambig page had to lead to two pages or something like that. I'm not really sure what their rationale was. But that's how things got as they are.

I am going to remove the tag now; I hope you understand why this is here now. I certainly would not mind going down to just a disambig page; certainly that would take care of the need, as far as I'm concerned. But I don't believe that I, as an non-sysop, can delete a page. Unschool 09:29, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

"Double winners" have occurred a number of times in US lotteries (and elsewhere.) However, the claim that the odds of winning twice were 1 in 3 trillion would be true ONLY if she had bought NO lottery tickets of any kind between her two wins. In other words, assuming she bought lottery tickets in the four years after her first win, she had chances (probably many) to become a second-time "winner" before she won again last year. 216.179.123.105 17:48, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

What you say about those odds applying only if she bought no tickets in between makes perfect sense (and it doesn't surprise me that the media doesn't mention that). Still, how many double winners of million dollar prizes/annuities have there been? Unschool 19:27, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Delete by redirect

The unexplained decision by the anon to create a redirect for this article is hard to see as anything but a backhanded attempt to delete the article. There was no mention of Ms. Wilson in the MegaMillions article, there was no proposal for a merger, it would have made almost as much sense to change this article into a redirect to pizza. Reverting. If the anon wishes to delete this article, then please follow proper procedures. Unschool 21:00, 7 November 2007 (UTC)