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Is this death in Houston notable?
Hi! I collected sources about a 2006 killing of an MS-13 gang member in Houston by a 16-year old girl: Talk:Montrose,_Houston#2006_gang_incident_in_Ervan_Chew_park_-_Archived_articles - It received a lot of media coverage through the Houston Chronicle series "The Butterfly and the Knife," and Texas Monthly did an article about the girl years after the incident. I found a Houston Press article that stated that "The murder trial of fascinated Houston "
This falls under the WikiProject since the girl (16 at the time, criminal responsibility age in Texas is 17) who killed him pleaded guilty to aggravated assault as part of a plea deal.
Do you think that there are enough sources to write about this case, or should I look for additional ones? WhisperToMe (talk) 15:15, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
RfC: Does "murder" presume "murderer" #2
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This was discussed before here, and that discussion was closed with no consensus due to the differing opinions with clear points to back their arguments. However, it's become a bit of an issue again and I'd like to bring it up a second time so a clear consensus can (hopefully) be reached and we can put this controversy to a rest. I'll repeat the question posed by InedibleHulk, because I can't phrase it any better: "Does calling a killing 'murder' on Misplaced Pages, in the body, infobox or categories, presume the suspect(s) in a resulting and ongoing/upcoming murder trial is/are 'murderer(s)', contrary to the presumption of innocence bit of WP:BLPCRIME?" Versus001 (talk) 06:39, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- Yes Rather than repeat everything from last time, I'll just say I still believe it. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:44, October 8, 2015 (UTC)
- Comment If you want a real RfC on this, you need to follow the steps. As is, only people coming by this page will see it. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:47, October 8, 2015 (UTC)
- Oh, my bad. Versus001 (talk) 07:04, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- All's well that ends well, so things that fix themselves early should be OK, too. You can delete this part now, if you'd like. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:33, October 8, 2015 (UTC)
- Oh, my bad. Versus001 (talk) 07:04, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- Comment Did I do something wrong? Because no one else seems to be participating... Versus001 (talk) 20:38, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
- Misplaced Pages's a busy place. Maybe people aren't aware of the RfC, or maybe they don't care (or just don't care to comment again, so soon after the last). Sort of like how buying a pinball machine doesn't mean you'll profit or break even, even when pinball was cool. You might have skimped a bit on the publicity, but technically, it looks fine. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:17, October 9, 2015 (UTC)
- Oh... Versus001 (talk) 16:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
- Misplaced Pages's a busy place. Maybe people aren't aware of the RfC, or maybe they don't care (or just don't care to comment again, so soon after the last). Sort of like how buying a pinball machine doesn't mean you'll profit or break even, even when pinball was cool. You might have skimped a bit on the publicity, but technically, it looks fine. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:17, October 9, 2015 (UTC)
- NO When police or investigative bodies report that a killing was indeed a murder, even if they are not certain whom the perpetrator might be, Misplaced Pages is right to label it as such with the use of valid references confirming it. Murder is a legal term that suggests other(s) were involved in a killing, whereas a tree falling on someone is a killing without a murder. Differentiating between happenstance and intent by at least one other is fair game, even when we are not certain who that might be. If an article mentions a suspect, it behooves editors to use the words "alleged" or 'suspect' without assigning guilt. Juda S. Engelmayer (talk) 11:35, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
- This is where the last one failed, too. Homicide is the term for people killing people. Murder requires that killing to be unlawful, inexcusable and intentional. Only a court can decide the latter, which is why pre-trial investigative reports don't use the word and newspapers use it with "alleged".
- This question is only about how this affects "the suspect(s) in a resulting and ongoing/upcoming murder trial". It's not about unknown people. InedibleHulk (talk) 12:24, October 9, 2015 (UTC)
- No The articles in question are more focused on the events rather than the suspects from my perspective. There's only one section dedicated to the suspect (excluding any info at the end of an "Event" section that details the suspect's arrest), and even then, it doesn't outright presume he/she is guilty (which I think is the problem, if I'm reading this correctly). If anything, I think the real issue is keeping the amount of info related to the suspect at a bare minimum to prevent any unintentional implications. I.e., no infobox, limit/monitor the amount/wording of info, probably no photo. Warner Sun (talk) 01:31, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- Essentially No BLP issues should not dictate how an event is described, but considering BLP issues can guide us in how an event should be described. In most articles a description of an event will be made in Misplaced Pages's voice and that description should present a neutral POV based on information from reliable sources. If RS's say event is "type A" and the description is not seriously and/or broadly contested in RS's, then it should be OK to say it in Misplaced Pages's voice. If it is contested, we find some neutral way to describe it that is not likely to be contested and BLP issues can be used to find neutral wording. For instance, in the case where someone was shot and it is contested that it was murder, we usually describe the event as a shooting. In the case where someone calls it a murder, but it is too contested to say so in Misplaced Pages's voice, we only mention murder making it clear who is saying it and only if the POV is notable enough to mention. Richard-of-Earth (talk) 20:54, 11 October 2015 (UTC)
- No, but be cautious. There are plenty of crimes that are pretty obviously murder, even if there is no suspect. The naming of a suspect does not, practically speaking, make such a crime no longer a murder nor does it imply guilt of the accused. There is not a strong enough BLP concern here to warrant a blanket ban on calling crimes murders until someone is convicted; it needs to be a case by case analysis that balances WP:V with WP:BLPCRIME. And for crap's sake, Versus001 (and anyone else) quit interpreting case-by-case discussions as applicable to every other article in the encyclopedia. VQuakr (talk) 22:54, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
- Speaking of case analysis and caution, it may interest you to know that Versus001 has been convicted of impersonating the DisuseKid, who is allegedly your Igor-like sidekick. And also User:Warner Sun, because this cloak and dagger horseshit wasn't convoluted enough. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:52, October 15, 2015 (UTC)
- @InedibleHulk: yup, the indef should preclude the article-space disruption I was complaining about above. VQuakr (talk) 02:02, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- Speaking of case analysis and caution, it may interest you to know that Versus001 has been convicted of impersonating the DisuseKid, who is allegedly your Igor-like sidekick. And also User:Warner Sun, because this cloak and dagger horseshit wasn't convoluted enough. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:52, October 15, 2015 (UTC)
- No. If there was a murder then naturally someone committed it, but if that person's identity has not been proven, then Misplaced Pages cannot state that some person is the murderer. Omnedon (talk) 01:38, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- If there was a murder. Sometimes deaths look like murder, but turn out to be other things when the facts have been argued in court. Or they actually are murders, but justice failed. In those cases, we still have to take the presiding judge's word for it. Before a judge rules, best to allow for all possible outcomes. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:44, October 16, 2015 (UTC)
- That's what I said: if there is a murder. If there was not a murder, this question is irrelevant. How would we allow for all possible outcomes by calling a suspect a murderer? Omnedon (talk) 03:04, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- We wouldn't. We'd do it by not calling deaths murders while the process of figuring out if it was a murder is ongoing. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:40, October 16, 2015 (UTC)
- But you are again missing the point. If it has been determined to be a murder, we cannot call anyone the murderer until that is determined. Omnedon (talk) 17:24, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- There's definitely some sort of confusion here, either about the question or the answer. It almost seems like we largely agree, despite the Yes and No parts. This happened a lot last time, too. Maybe we're on different pages regarding "determining murder". How do you think a murder is determined, if not by trying the suspected murderer(s) in court? InedibleHulk (talk) 19:50, October 16, 2015 (UTC)
- But you are again missing the point. If it has been determined to be a murder, we cannot call anyone the murderer until that is determined. Omnedon (talk) 17:24, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- We wouldn't. We'd do it by not calling deaths murders while the process of figuring out if it was a murder is ongoing. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:40, October 16, 2015 (UTC)
- That's what I said: if there is a murder. If there was not a murder, this question is irrelevant. How would we allow for all possible outcomes by calling a suspect a murderer? Omnedon (talk) 03:04, 16 October 2015 (UTC)
- If there was a murder. Sometimes deaths look like murder, but turn out to be other things when the facts have been argued in court. Or they actually are murders, but justice failed. In those cases, we still have to take the presiding judge's word for it. Before a judge rules, best to allow for all possible outcomes. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:44, October 16, 2015 (UTC)
- Comment - This is a bit of an aside... but before the discussion goes further, we need to draw an important distinction: Wikipeida recognizes that there is a difference between NAMING and DESCRIBING. Please read WP:POVNAME (part of our WP:Article titles policy), WP:POVNAMING (part of our WP:Neutral point of view Policy) and Misplaced Pages:Naming conventions (events)#Maintaining neutral point of view ... if an event is routinely named "The X Murder" by reliable sources, then it should be named "The X Murder" in Misplaced Pages (regardless of whether the event fits the legal definition of murder). However, if the sources merely describe the event as being a murder, we should be much more careful about doing so ourselves... we want to use accurate terms (so this is where legal definitions need to be taken into consideration). Blueboar (talk) 15:33, 17 October 2015 (UTC)
- No, not least because the identification of a victim as having been murdered can't reflect on a suspect as anything other than an alleged murderer — as opposed to implying the suspect is unqualifiedly a murderer. (Possibly I'm being overly nitpicky, but this seems an area in which we should all try to use language as precisely as possible, lest we libel by accident.) While it's true that the technical term used by medical examiners in describing the manner of someone's death is "homicide" and not "murder", using "homicide" as a verb is nonstandard English, and thus official statements by police and prosecutors tend to refer to victims as having been "murdered", not "homicided". (Families and friends of victims tend to say "murdered" as well, but there's rarely reason to expect them to know the technical definition, much less reason to expect them to want to be fair to potential suspects.)
- Referring to a dead person as "murdered" or "murder victim" before there's a dispositive trial for that murder could cause some potential issues for us as Misplaced Pages editors, mostly because readers may wrongly infer that if there was a murder, then the suspects must be murderers. But I'm not convinced that the fact some readers may misunderstand plain English is grounds for not using plain English.
- I see more potential issues in cases where everyone including the suspect agrees that the suspect's actions lead to the victim's death, but the question of whether the correct verdict is "guilty of murder", "guilty of manslaughter" or "not guilty (because it was an unforeseeable accident)" has yet to be decided by a jury; I'm inclined to think that in cases like that, because there's a real question remaining as to whether a murder/homicide has been committed, Misplaced Pages should avoid use of "murdered" and "murder victim", and only refer to "murder of " if that's overwhelmingly how the event is referred to by reliable sources. But for cases where the main question is who murdered the victim, rather than whether a murder happened at all, I think that "murdered", etc. should be acceptable usage. As for what to do about cases where a trial has returned a not guilty verdict and no further trials seem likely, I think the case of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman would be a useful example to examine, because while some (such as O.J. Simpson) have argued that "the real killers" remain at large and others believe Simpson simply got away with murder, I've never come across someone arguing that Brown Simpson and Goldman weren't in fact murdered. (Sorry for the wall of text.) —GrammarFascist contribs 18:56, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
- No, it does not, in response to the specific question asked. We are required by WP:V and WP:NPOV to repeat only how sources describe an event; if sources describe an event as a murder, then so do we. That does not automatically imply that anyone associated with the event is a murderer, not in any way, unless we state explicitly that they were convicted of the crime. And of course we would not do that without reliable sources. There seems to be a point of confusion here that describing someone's death as murder requires a conviction; it certainly does not: as GrammarFascist struggled to point out, a person can have been clearly murdered without the murderer being identified at all, let alone convicted. If sources describe an event as a murder, then so do we. Ivanvector 🍁 (talk) 19:37, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
Help with List of events named massacres
I've started a discussion on talkpage about a recent massive ip insertion of events not commonly named massacres to the list. Does anyone here have an opinion one way or the other? BusterD (talk) 21:30, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
Does this qualify for an article? What should it be called?
A young mother and her daughter were last seen by their family in 2008 in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. A woman's body was found in Belanglo State Forest in 2010. A child's body was found near Wynarka, South Australia (1100 km from Belanglo) June this year. The police have determined in October that the bodies are Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and her daughter Khandalyce Kiara Pearce, they were both killed violently, and neither where they were found. Both bodies and the identification have attracted news coverage across Australia. My questions are whether there should be a separate article to avoid undue wight in the two articles about the places where the bodies were found, and what it should be called. I have not found relevant crime notability or article naming guidelines. Thank you. --Scott Davis 21:31, 22 October 2015 (UTC)
- Draft article now at User:ScottDavis/sandbox3 but I don't like the name I used in the first sentence. --Scott Davis 01:28, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
- Someone suggested a better name, so the article is now at Deaths of Karlie Pearce-Stevenson and Khandalyce Pearce. --Scott Davis 03:33, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Scientific American source/prevalence of domestic violence data at the Domestic violence article
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Talk:Domestic violence#Should the Scientific American "rates of domestic violence are roughly equal between men and women" material be included? A WP:Permalink for it is here. Flyer22 (talk) 06:00, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
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