Wikipedia:Dead rat

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.