Talk:Stampede

Love Parade

That what happened in Duisburg was clearly not a stampede. People were frightened by the tunnel and were searching for an alternative route to get out of that mess. Fear was at such a high level that people were kicking, punching and shoving those around them to get more space. If it was a stampede why did the crowd did not get any step further?

Love Parade

I think one should not rush into publishing the number of people killed because the number currently being reported by the media is not "final" so to say. This evening another person died due to injuries suffered at the parade. The same is true for the number of injured. Wikipedia is not a news media. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.226.86.71 (talk) 18:52, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Chronological order

The list of stampedes should be in reverse chronological order. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.161.157.27 (talk) 21:03, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Why? There seems to be far too much reverse chronological ordering of things on the Internet, which makes it very difficult to follow things logically and in order. This seems to be a relatively new phenomenon which I hardly ever saw in any print media prior to the Internet becoming popular.

Unless there's a compelling reason to the contrary (and I find it difficult to think of one), I think events and other time-based details should be listed in forward order - the order they actually happened in. It's unnatural, and sometimes confusing, to read about recent events first, then go back to earlier ones. M.J.E. (talk) 11:13, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

Hillsborough

The Hillsborough Disaster was not a human stampede, it was a human crush.

Agree with anon above. I'm removing it but will link it here so it can be made available for anyone who wants to see why Plutonium27 (talk) 23:08, 3 June 2008 (UTC) LINK Hillsborough disaster

This page covers both stampedes and crushes. 64.142.90.33 (talk) 07:55, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

This link and reference of Hillsborough to Human Stampedes needs to be taken down immediately. The Hillsborough Independent Report has proven that there was no 'stampede' at Hillsborough. By including Hillsborough under the banner of 'human stampede' you are suggesting a falsehood. Please remove this link. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lynnefox (talk • contribs) 19:06, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Portuguese

The link to the Portuguese Wiki is wrong. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.86.168.15 (talk) 14:05, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Major Omission

Could we include the 1990 hajj stampede that killed 1,426? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.98.209.196 (talk) 23:18, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Cattle stampedes

This article is a little unbalanced, it talks mostly about human stampedes, but very little about cattle stampedes, or even stampedes in the wild, hence even though the info on cattle stampedes is not very much, at least it's a start.

Ll1324 (talk) 00:53, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

1934 Kyoto

There's a citation needed tag on the January 8, 1934 stampede at Kyoto station; I found this but it's a pay to view article so I can't see anything other than the headline. Since I can't see what it actually confirms, I'm putting it here in case anybody with access would like to add it. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C10FC3559177A93CBA9178AD85F408385F9 MorganaFiolett (talk) 11:18, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Same story, but free article. (Lord Gøn (talk) 20:52, 4 May 2010 (UTC))

Birmingham, Alabama, 1902

If anyone's interested, there was a stampede in the Shiloh Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, which left 115 people dead. Here's an article about the incident by the New York Times. (Lord Gøn (talk) 20:49, 4 May 2010 (UTC))

Rhinos

Rhinos are mentioned in the lead paragraph. They're not herd animals, so can they be said to stampede? Charge, more like! Rojomoke (talk) 09:57, 18 September 2010 (UTC)

Spin-off

Shouldn't Human stampede have a separate article? Just the list of human stampedes is far longer than the entire bit on animal stampedes. Should we merge, say, Human sexuality and Animal sexuality? Thought not. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.6.96.22 (talk) 08:27, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree. When I want to learn about human stampedes, I'll look for an article called Human Stampedes. I think this article is more on human stampedes than on animal stampedes, and it bothers me. I don't want to have to sift through information that is related but not pertaining to the article on hand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.38.67.196 (talk) 05:23, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Concur. Maybe move this section and redirect to

Main article: List of human crushes

, and retitle that? That list is pretty thorough.

Children in a Nightclub?

Noticed one curious entry:

    December 21, 2001: 7 children, 10 to 14 years of age, were crushed to death due to a stampede on the stairway, leading to the entrance of a nightclub in Sofia, Bulgaria

I clicked on the link to learn more, but it's not in English. Why were there children at the entrance to a nightclub? If anyone can read the link, please answer. Curiosity is getting the better of me. Thanks. Van Vidrine (talk) 14:48, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

A lot of clubs have children's nights where they don't serve alcohol and parents chaperone...it's basically like a school-dance type atmosphere but it makes the kids feel cool for being in a club, plus the clubs get paid big-time because these often "pack the house" even when they double the door-charge 66.214.218.24 (talk) 02:02, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Neutrality of this word...

I would caution against using this word for human disasters. It seems that it's always the developing world where the media declares a stampede and the developed world where the media declares a disaster. My own feelings about this word associate it with animals, as does most dictionaries. I believe the connatation isn't neutral when you look through the list and see countries with white people described as tragedies/disasters, but the word for Asians, Muslims, and dark skinned people tends to be stampede...Youbetterwork (talk) 07:33, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Most crowd disasters are not due to Stampedes

Most disasters listed in the article are not due to Stampedes, where mass panic breaks out and people rush headlong into a choke point and get crushed. Researchers looking into the Love Parade Disaster discovered a hitherto unrecognised crowd dynamical process that can kill people in large crows - the Crowd Quake.

Essentially, in normal crowd there is personal space between people, even in quite crowded situations there is room to breath and move even a little bit. This personal space accommodates and cushions any mass movement. However, at a critical point of density there is no personal space at all around people, they are in full body contact on all sides. In this new situation, random fluctuations in crowd movement and jostling efficiently transmits extreme forces through the crowd - the Crowd Quake or Crowd Turbulence. It is akin to changing a compressible gas into an incompressible solid, unfortunately people are not incompressible.

This is why crowd disasters happen so suddenly, why external observers and survivors mistakenly think the sudden transition from normality to panic is due to a stampede. The article needs allot of work to clear up this mess. Ref: Crowd Disasters as Systemic Failures: Analysis of the Love Parade Disaster [1] --Diamonddavej (talk) 18:38, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

You are quite correct, and there is a lively discussion on Talk:2015 Mina stampede among editors who are arguing whether the article should be changed to "2015 Mina disaster". Although use of the word "stampede" is universally condemned by experts on crowd behavior and progressive crowd collapse events, it seems to be the preferred term when UK and USA-based journalists describe crowd collapse disasters in the Middle East, India, Africa, and the Far East. Consciously or not, it seems important for Western journalistic organizations to vilify these victims, particularly if the contexts of their deaths involve religious rituals or pilgrimages. Imagine calling the "Hillsborough disaster" the "Hillsborough stampede"; what could be more dehumanizing? Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 15:18, 5 October 2015 (UTC)

RfC opened for use of "stampede" to describe human crowd disasters

I opened an RfC at Manual_of_Style/Words_to_watch to discuss the use of the word "stampede" in article titles and content concerning human crowd disasters. It might be of interest to people reading this article. Dcs002 (talk) 09:51, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Stampede vs. crush

There is discussion above about crushes not being stampedes. Maybe it is time to separate this article into "Stampede" (mostly about animals, a little about humans, with a comment that most events called stampedes are actually crushes) and "Crowd crush" (at present a REDIRECT here)? Pol098 (talk) 17:00, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

Pol098, Stampedes and crushes are not the only types of deadly crowd disasters. There are also progressive crowd collapses (mentioned in this article) and crowd turbulence (also called crowd quakes), which can cause both crushes and collapses. Crushes can also cause crowd collapses, but they don't always. Defining each term will be important, as will discussing causation. (E.g., overcrowding in a limited space can cause crowd turbulence, which can cause a crush (not always) or a crowd collapse (not always) or both, both of which can cause crush (or compression) asphyxia.)

There is an interview with a Liverpool fan on an ESPN documentary on the Hillsborough Disaster who said crowd turbulence (he didn't call it that - he described it) used to be common in the standing areas ("Kop End" at Anfield), but it was part of the experience. As the area was not confined into pens at the time, the pressure could be relieved, and it wasn't perceived as dangerous.

I think an important aspect of such an article should include how they are reported. This includes your point about the use of the word "stampede," but also how under-reported they are (e.g., between the First- and Second Ibrox Disasters, there were another three serious crushes, one deadly (2 or 3 dead - can't remember now), and dozens injured), with proper sourcing of course.

I think there is enough material to start a new article. I'd be happy to get that going. We have plenty of RS, and in this article, I think this discussion is maybe undue weight that should be made into its own article, and confine the human stampede section to events that were true stampedes, preferably stampedes that will be non-controversially termed as such. Dcs002 (talk) 23:51, 16 October 2015 (UTC)

have absolutely no disagreement with you. When I started editing in this vein, Stampede didn't have any section acknowledging crushes (though the distinction was made, and crushing was discussed). I edited the material and added headings, adding a reference to progressive crowd collapse. I also created Crowd collapse as redirect to the crush section of this article (not ideal, but better than nothing), and edited several articles in a way I thought more appropriate. I'd tend to group phenomena causing harm by crushing as Crowd crush (that's just what I think, and I'm perfectly happy about any other reasonable position); the mechanism of harm is crushing (and not trampling), although the various dynamics of the crowd that cause crushes are different. If the sections get too big it could be separated out. Quite a lot of articles linking to Stampede would need changing. Crowd control, an article I've edited a bit, would also come under this project. Your suggestion about separating undue weight and so on is exactly what I think, and tried to say in my original, very brief, comment. I personally am not an expert on the subject, but would like to see it treated properly—it's important, and usually dismissed by those actually responsible as a stampede of the stupid. Pol098 (talk) 10:12, 17 October 2015 (UTC)

Pol098, you and I both need to be careful about righting great wrongs, I think. I am interested in how under-reported crowd disasters and their causes are, and you are interested in the false "stampede of the stupid" mentality. These are both very valid social concerns of course, and I think very few people who have studied the issue even a little would disagree. I'm just saying we need to be vigilant against our own biases and try not to advocate for social change. It's ok that we have biases. Everybody does. We just need to acknowledge them and do our best to keep them in check. (I am definitely speaking to both of us.)

I have taken on another project just now, and it will be a week or so before I can get to this one. There is a great deal of academic literature (primary and secondary) and a fair amount of press coverage of the whole topic, so creating a good, comprehensive, RS-based article should be relatively straightforward. Dcs002 (talk) 23:16, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm not sure if you are all racist or stupid (possibly both?) but this article certainly is. Not sure why you are all ignoring the discussion on this page. There seems to be *very active* resistance to making it better. Crushed in space — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.154.152.214 (talk) 22:49, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

Believe me, we are working on it. A lot of us want to make it better. Vesuvius Dogg (talk) 14:11, 26 October 2015 (UTC)

I agree with User:Pol098 that we should consider splitting stampedes and crowd (or human) crushes. The article does a fairly good job of pointing out that they are not the same thing. Stampedes don't always lead to crushing incidents, and crushes may occur without a stampede. Packing too may people into a space causes crushes regardless of whether there is any stampede. It seems to me that the term "crowd crushes" is bit more common than "human crushes" but I didn't dig very far. If we create a new article for crushes whichever title is chosen will require a redirect form the other term.

Victim blaming

In the "Crushes" section is the following
A common aftermath of a crush with serious consequences is that those responsible for the event where the crush took place, authorities such as police and government bodies, and news media blame the crowd and the victims for being out of control and causing the crush, sometimes to the extent of a full cover-up. Later analysis, sometimes after those actually responsible have retired, may show that the disaster was largely caused (in the moral and legal rather than physical sense) by actions of those planning or in authority of the event, as in the Hillsborough disaster which killed 96 football spectators; actions by the crowd were blamed until investigations three decades later found manifold errors by those responsible for organising and controlling the football event, with members of the crowd being hapless victims.
The reference given relates only to Hillsborough. There is no citation for the statement that victim blaming is a "common aftermath". None of the examples given in the "Examples of crushes and stampedes" seems to demonstrate such victim blaming (this is not to say authorities did not try to avoid blame, but they apparently didn't blame the crushes on the victims). Therefore IMO the para quoted is OR and POV. (Of course victim blaming did occur in relation to Hillsborough, I'm just saying it's not shown to be a "common" occurrence.) Comments? Newburyjohn (talk) 12:32, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Agree that the section as-is lacks enough such examples or references to make the statement that such is common. However, I wouldn't call it OR and/or POV, but rather, very, very under-referenced. There are many sources stating such a thing is, indeed, common.

• "[But] almost no one speaks for the crowd, and the crowd usually takes the blame." The New Yorker
• "A common reaction – indeed the usual reaction – is to evoke the idea of an indiscriminate mob, of mass panic. To blame, in short, the crowd." The Guardian
• "Pressure is the primary horror of a crowd crush. Not panic. And until we accept that, we will keep having more of them. Because blaming the crowd lifts the onus of responsibility off the officials tasked with managing the crowd and puts it on the backs of the dead." Amanda Ripley's site. Technically a blog, but a blog by an investigative journalist, not Joe Random. Still, of all sources probably not the best, either.
• "We often see sensational headlines, like “Panic”, “Stampede” but when you analyse the facts the crowd is rarely the cause of major incidents. The reports below highlight how often these media words are used in reports. It is both misleading and misinforming the public on causality of major incidents, propagating the myth of of panic, diverting attention away from systematic failure of organisations to provide a safe environment for places of public assembly." G. Keith Still, Professor of Crowd Science at Manchester Metropolitan University (UK)
• "When talking about crowd disasters, public media often use the term ‘mass panic’, which suggests the occurrence of a stampede as reason of the disaster. This suggests that crowd disasters happen, because the crowd ‘goes mad’." article in EPJ Data Science

I'll hunt down a few more potential references and such when I get the time, as I have to step away from the computer for a bit. AddWittyNameHere (talk) 03:54, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

"Victim blaming"? You see umpty-dozen hundred people packed into a small area. You enter said small area. You get crushed. How are you not responsible? You don't have to enter. --Khajidha (talk) 12:27, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

It's the pressure of the later arrivals that increases the density of the crowd of earlier arrivals so that falls and surges become deadly. These can be out of sight of the later arrivals, who may be unaware that there are "umpty-dozen hundred people packed into a small area", may not themselves enter "the small area" and will often not "get crushed". It's often difficult therefore to hold those late arrivals responsible but it's inappropriate to call earlier arrivals (such as ticket-holders taking their places at the front of a grandstand) responsible and tell them they didn't have to enter. 92.19.25.65 (talk) 14:28, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Links

Needs more links to other articles. I've done the work on the Cattle Stampedes section, can someone do more? If not, I will eventually continue. [[User:Dibbydib|Dibbydib]] ([[User talk: Dibbydib|talk!]]) ([[Special:Contributions/Dibbydib|contributions!]]) (talk) 07:15, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

Your edit has been reverted, we do not link common English terms. See Wp:OVERLINK. Canterbury Tail talk 14:19, 12 September 2019 (UTC)

It is factually incorrect and potentially dangerous to conflate stampedes and crushes

These two should be separate articles. Crushes are not caused by people running in panic. Increasingly even mainstream press is no longer using the word "stampede" to describe crushes. Wikipedia should absolutely follow suit. --2A00:23C6:CC00:2000:89B2:5369:DDE3:29C3 (talk) 20:21, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Agreed — the material on crushes now appears in a separate article called crowd crush. Einsof (talk) 02:56, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

No: Considering the amount of discussion here, this is hardly uncontroversial, and your action, simply hacking out 18Kb of material with little explanation, and re-labelling it crowd crush, is hardly ideal. So I have reverted it, per WP:BRD. If you want to split the article , then make a split proposal, saying what you want to move, and where to, and explain why. Moonraker12 (talk) 13:51, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

In your note on my talk page, which you have linked here, you accuse me of "effectively passing off the work of the editors at the [stampede] article as [my] own", citing attribution requirements on WP:CWW. In fact I satisfied these attribution requirements with appropriate edit summaries ([2] [3]). Objecting to the split on procedural grounds is one thing, but falsely accusing me of plagiarism is wholly unacceptable. Einsof (talk) 15:46, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

See Template:Copied, which should be on the talk page. We can argue about that if you wish, or you can address the issue, by explaining how and why the article should be split. Moonraker12 (talk) 18:08, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

Oppose. While there are some voices claiming that "stampede" is inadequate [4][5], many sources still use the term "stampede" without qualification, including an Nature article cited thousands of times [6], the New York Times [7], The Washington Post [8], the Wall Street Journal [9], AlJazeera [10], Reuters [11] and the Jerusalem Post [12]. WP:DUE applies to the idea that stampedes are rare or inexistent. JBchrch (talk) 16:58, 1 May 2021 (UTC)

(This is the same user as the IP editor above) If most reliable sources also use the word "stampede" it seems like the real issue here is that in general usage the word actually has two very different meanings. The recent event in Israel was not an "uncontrolled concerted running as an act of mass impulse... in an attempt to escape a perceived threat" and as far as I know no source has described it in terms even vaguely similar to this. It's not like the sources are lying about what happened, they all clearly describe a crowd crush, but do so using the word "stampede". The same is presumably true for pretty much all other recent crowd crush disasters. In fact I would guess that, at least when talking about humans, "stampede" almost never refers to the "uncontrolled running" definition in the context of news articles. If splitting isn't an option I instead think we should make clear in the lede that "stampede" refers to these two different phenomenon. There are already sources cited in this article that explain the confusion over the word and its two meanings. --Cyllel (talk) 00:38, 2 May 2021 (UTC)

I agree entirely with the sentiment in the heading, but it is precisely because this conflation happens, with elements of the media routinely describing crush incidents as 'stampedes' that the two should be dealt with together, to put them in juxtaposition. We could also do with an article specifically on human crush incidents, as it is a subject in itself. But as there is currently no proposal to split this article, or any explanation of how or why such a split should occur, any further discussion on that subject is, I would suggest, academic. Moonraker12 (talk) 17:58, 3 May 2021 (UTC)

I think it's clear that a split proposal would fail because the preponderance of sources use "stampede" as a synonym of "crush" (at least when talking about humans). Therefore I propose that the two meanings of the word should be mentioned explicitly in the lead to reflect the sources. In fact it looks like most of the currently cited sources for this article use the word "stampede" to mean "crush", yet the lead only mentions the "uncontrolled concerted running" definition, a definition of the word that the media almost never uses. If we're going to agree with the media that "stampede" can also refer to crushes then the article should make that clear from the beginning.

Maybe adding something like this: "In popular usage 'stampede' also refers to situations in which people were injured or have died due to compression in very dense crowds. This is more properly known as a 'crowd crush' or 'crush'. --Cyllel (talk) 03:34, 4 May 2021 (UTC)

@Cyllel:: Regarding your comment, the preponderance of sources use of stampede as a synonym for crush; I think that's debatable. US media seems to, but UK media and others don’t so much. And academic sources use appropriate terms; when describing crush incidents they call them crushes, not stampedes. As for if we are going to agree with the media; that rather begs the question doesn’t it? This is an encyclopaedia, not a media outlet, so we should agree with the scientific wisdom as much as anything. And if media sources use misnomers we should point that out. I think your proposed addition doesn't go any way far enough. How about "Some media sources refer to situations... but this is a misnomer; the more appropriate term would be crush, or crowd collapse" (I'm not convinced about "crowd crush"; it seems to be a WP term). Thoughts? Moonraker12 (talk) 15:26, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

@Moonraker12: Thanks for your response, that wording looks good to me. I've gone ahead and added it to the article. --Cyllel (talk) 18:23, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

Split proposal

Hello, I believe that the section Crushes and Prevention should be split into a new article called Crowd crush as they are out of focus. The main article Stampede and these sections are talking about different phenomena, and it has led to confusion on other talk pages, see above and Astroworld Festival crowd crush. As such this section should be split per WP:CONSPLIT. This has been going on for some time and should be dealth with. Swordman97 ^{talk to me} 23:33, 7 November 2021 (UTC)

@2A00:23C6:CC00:2000:89B2:5369:DDE3:29C3, Cyllel, Moonraker, JBchrch, Einsof, Jim Michael, WWGB, and Pikavoom:

Alternate proposal: create a new article called Crowd accidents (or similar, open to suggestion here) and use that for human stampedes and human crushes. On that article it can be stated that crushes and stampedes are separate events, but are often conflated and can occur simultaneously. This article can then remain focused specifically on the stampede concept but its primary focus can be on animal stampedes, with reference to the new article for the kind of event we're currently discussing. Retswerb (talk) 23:42, 7 November 2021 (UTC)