Wikipedia:Notability (criminal acts)

This guideline is intended to resolve differences of opinion at various AfD debates on crimes that have received intense media coverage. Examples of such debates include those of Eve Carson and Lauren Burk. In these cases, those favouring deletion did so on the basis of several policies, including WP:NOT#NEWS and WP:BLP1E, whilst those opposing deletion cited the breadth of coverage as satisfying the general notability guidelines. These have been highly contentious debates, and this guideline is proposed to attempt to reach a community consensus on how future similarly situated articles should be handled.

Notability of criminal acts

An article about a criminal act encompasses articles on a topic where a crime has been proven, or an event has been deemed a likely crime by the relevant law enforcement agency or judicial authority. For example, the disappearance of a person would fall under this guideline if law enforcement agencies deemed it likely to have been caused by a criminal act or to have occurred in a suspicious manner.

Intense media coverage can confer notability on a high-profile criminal act, provided such coverage meets Wikipedia's policies and guidelines on reliable sources. However, since Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, it may be better in the first instance to create a Wikinews article about it until the event is mentioned by a significant number of third-party sources that have at least national or global scope.

This criterion means that multiple sources are required, not just multiple references from a single or small number of sources. It would therefore be insufficient to base an article on a series of news reports on a crime by a single newspaper or news channel. The requirement for national or global scope refers to how widespread the coverage of a topic is. In the case where a television or radio channel has several regional outlets, such as Fox News, one regional station counts as local coverage. Repeating this over multiple stations belonging to the same network that covers an entire country is considered to be a single instance of coverage with national or global scope.

Similarly, where a single news wire story or press release has been used by several news publications, this should only be counted as a single source in all notability decisions. Likewise, when reporters base their information on other news coverage (for example, "AP reported that ..."), the coverage is only a single source. Such derivative reports are not independent and so cannot be used to verify each other. However, if multiple mainstream news outlets report on a single event separately and without reference to others, these constitute multiple sources.

Finally, media sources sometimes report on events because of their similarity to another widely reported incident. For example, the death of Mari Luz Cortés was compared in multiple outlets of the British tabloid press to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Editors should not rely on such sources to afford notability to the new event, since the main purpose of such articles is to highlight the old event.

Criteria for inclusion of articles on participants

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, a tertiary source. Articles on individuals, especially living individuals, should be drawn from reliable secondary sources. Tabloid stories about a murder victim are not a good basis for a biography, ideal sources are books and scholarly articles offering substantial treatment of the individual and the background for their involvement.

Any notability of the crime is not automatically inherited by the victims or perpetrators of such crimes, and articles should not automatically be created on these individuals, in accordance with WP:BLP1E. However, the victims and/or perpetrators of notable crimes may have articles under certain conditions.

Victims

Editors may wish to create an article on an individual victim if they are notable for something beyond the crime itself. However, victims of high-profile crimes do not automatically qualify as notable enough to have a stand-alone article. Notability here is defined as satisfying some other aspect of the notability of persons guideline that does not relate to the crime in question.

As such, a victim of a crime should normally only be the subject of an article where an article that satisfied notability criteria existed, or could have properly been created prior to the crime's commission. Thus, attempts at inclusion prompted by appearance in the press should not be excluded if notability can be otherwise asserted.

Perpetrators

Editors should consider creating articles on perpetrators if:

• they are notable for something beyond the crime itself. However, perpetrators of high-profile crimes do not automatically qualify as notable enough to have a stand-alone article. Notability here is defined as satisfying some other aspect of the notability of persons guideline that does not relate to the crime in question;
• the victim is a renowned world figure, or immediate family member of a renowned world figure, including but not limited to politicians or worldwide celebrities. A good test for this (but not a necessary prerequisite) would be if the victim has an uncontested Wikipedia article that predates the alleged crime or death;
• the motivation for the crime is unusual or otherwise significantly noteworthy;
• the execution of the crime is unusual or otherwise significantly noteworthy.

In the latter cases, editors must take note of the stringent conditions imposed by the guidelines for biographies of living persons. In particular, editors should remember that someone accused of a crime is not considered guilty of that crime until they have been found to be so under judicial process. If this has not occurred, editors must give serious consideration into not creating an article on an alleged perpetrator until a conviction is secured, since doing so not only risks violating WP:BLP, but also may not adequately satisfy notability guidelines.

Article structure

Article title

In cases where the victim or the perpetrator of a crime does not meet the criteria for an individual article, the material should generally be presented in an article documenting the event and not the people involved. For example, a high profile crime would have an article entitled "Murder of Joe Bloggs", "Disappearance of Jane Doe", etc.

If an article has already been created with a title not conforming to this convention, a discussion on the article's talk page should be attempted prior to moving the article to ensure that there are no editorial reasons for it remaining. This should not defer bold actions if there is no response to the discussion.

In cases where it would assist readers in finding the information, editors may wish to use redirect links or links on disambiguation pages to direct requests for key names, such as an individual victim or perpetrator, to the article based on the event. In the case where a participant already has an article, the usual guidelines regarding summarising main articles should apply.

Inclusion of biographical information

The class of articles detailed in the preceding section are meant to be about the event, and not the participants. This means that biographical information about participants should be limited to that which can be linked to the event; material that establishes the notablility of the event, or which is reasonably required to explain some aspect of the event. The application of this guideline will necessarily vary from article to article and should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Templates

If an event is still being widely covered in the press, editors may wish to place the {{currentevent}} template on it to inform readers of the rapidly changing nature of the article.