Talk:Jack the Ripper/Archive 3

Archives
January 2003 – February 2007

Semi-protection

The page seems to attract a vandal almost every day. I suggest we ask an admin for semi-protection, so it cannot be edited by anons. It's disheartening to see the edit history filled with so much useless clutter. MattHucke^(t) 12:55, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Lewis Carroll has a similar level of trouble and was inexplicably denied, but go for it. I'd love to see it happen. Viledandy 14:02, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Not a chance, it's nowhere near the level on Dwyane Wade and I've been denied twice when asking to get semi on there. Quadzilla99 02:52, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

We now have a one-week reprieve from the anonymous vandals:

16:02, 18 April 2007 Royalguard11 (Talk | contribs) m (Protected Jack the Ripper: lots of annon/new vandalism [edit=autoconfirmed:move=autoconfirmed] (expires 22:02, April 25, 2007 (UTC)))

Thanks Royalguard11 ! - MattHucke^(t) 22:11, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Jill the Ripper

I have created an article on the Jill the Ripper theory, (I was surprised that wasn't already one though), and I would appreiciate help expanding it.

List of proposed Jack the Ripper suspects already covers the couple of Jill the Ripper theories, and Jill the Ripper redirects to that article now. There's really not any way to expand it beyond what's already there, and certainly not much reason to, as it's an extremely minor theory. I also undid your change to mention Jill the Ripper in the lead, as, again, very minor theory, and even people who talk about Jack the Ripper possibly being female still call it the Jack the Ripper crimes, as that's the well known name. DreamGuy 02:10, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

References

Why are there hardly any references in this article? A very shoddy piece of work indeed: disorganised, incoherent and tendentious. This article needs a complete overhaul.Colin4C 19:26, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

This article could use some improvement, yes, but you've shown from your history of edits here that your idea of what would improve the article was often very shoddy itself and often based upon a gross misrepresentation of the sources to foist your own particular views onto the article. If this is your way of announcing that you've come back to start that all over again, I would advise against it.DreamGuy 23:46, 30 April 2007 (UTC)

I would like to start adding references to the article proper, as we could get it up to GA status without too much work. It might be best reading through the article, and seeing what statements we can attribute to books on the subject. Ideally every statement of fact should have a source. I'd suggest we mainly draw from Sugden's The Complete History of Jack The Ripper and Evans and Skinner's The Ultimate Jack The Ripper Sourcebook. They seem to be the most authoritative and least biased accounts. Thoughts anyone? Martin 16:53, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Those are two of the better ones, yes. Jack the Ripper: Scotland Yard Investigates by Evans and Rumbelow additionally has the benefit of being much more updated and recent, and at least less biased to the author's opinions than most. Even all those will only get you so far, as research into the field is very active and ongoing. DreamGuy 23:26, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Canonical five victims

Re. the assertion that horrific attacks against women were endemic during the period --

In an essay on Casebook: Jack the Ripper, Alexander Chisholm reports the following:

Statistics compiled for Joseph Loane's Sanitary Reports [for the Metropolitan Board of Works] - more recently given wider currency in Bruce Paley's "…The Simple Truth" - provide a valuable corrective to the popular image of Whitechapel as a murderous abyss, typified by Jack the Ripper's autumn of terror. They clearly testify to a scarcity of murder in Whitechapel, and provide compelling support for Superintendent Arnold's [head of H Division] belief that; "With the exception of the recent murders crime of a serious nature is not unusually heavy in the District." (MEPO 3/141 ff. 164-5).

Loane found that no homicides occurred in Whitechapel in 1887. Chisholm points out several flaws in Loane's methodology, principally that non-resident deaths, deaths by ambiguous means (e.g. head injuries) and unidentified bodies were not included in the findings. So murders probably escaped the account, but the low figures for the district, for London as a whole (eighty murders in a city of three million), and Superintendent Arnold's note must be taken into account. And if we look to Charles Booth, we see many 'respectable' streets chockablock with the hell of poverty. The murders were a sensation partially because violence on their scale was extremely uncommon, even in the East End. This is borne out by the contemporary press. (Why should Polly Nichols' death get extensive coverage in The Times, which was the newspaper of record for the civilized world?) The victims were not drops in a sea of blood. The press and public wanted to attribute Mackenzie, Coles, etc. to the Ripper because he was the resident bogeyman. --Viledandy 19:29, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

• Further to this, refer to Israel Lipski, who killed Miriam Angel in the neighbouring parish of St George's on 28 June 1887. If the area was truly a jungle, why was the case a cause celebre?

The attacks on Annie Millwood, etc. during autumn 1888, along with the reports of stalking, knife-brandishing, etc. should be very familiar to us. A well-publicised murder spawns copycats and fear mongering. When the Ripper disappeared, so, mostly, did they.Viledandy 19:43, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Unfortunately the statistics cited by Loane (and by authors with older books following that lead, such as Rumbelow, etc.) have been proven in more recent research to be wholly misleading. There were TONS of knife attacks all over. Trying to cite that would require citing a long, loing list of individual newspaper reports. It can be done, of course, but it's not typically how things are sourced here.

AS far as your claims about publicity for the murders, I'm afraid your trying to argue that there weren't many is nothing more than original research, and particularly misinformed OR at that. The Miriam Angle case was big news because it was a Jew committing cold blooded murder on a neighbor for sexual purposes, and of course there was a lot of antisemitism at the time.

Annie Millwood was not attacked during "autumn 1888" and her case and others like it did not get very well publicized. Millwood COULDN'T be a copycat of the Ripper as the Ripper officially didn;t even show up for months and months later. Nichols' death was the first major publicity push based upon the nature of the abdominal wounds and the (perceived) link to Tabram a few weeks before.

And trying to claim Mackenzie, Coles etc. were assigned to the Ripper by the press is POV-pushing to the bias that the Ripper *didn't* commit those murders. You seem to have a number of copycat theories and ideas and so forth that are clearly biasing you against the idea that the Ripper killed beyond the canonical five, which led you to to delete the statement saying that it's difficult to know who was killed by the Ripper or not. That is a clear violation of the WP:NPOV policy. I suggest you go read it before making any more edits. It's nice that you have strong opinions. Take it to the Casebook message board or somewhere else, because Wikipedia is not a place for you to advance your ideas. DreamGuy 23:20, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

There has to be a source for the statement though, otherwise it will have to be removed or rewritten. Crime figures that show a disproportionately high number of attacks against women for instance, or even a quote from someone would be acceptable. I'm not really convinced as to its relevance anyway, as it's rather ambiguous. Is it referring to all crime committed against women in Victorian London, or the Whitechapel Murders? If the former, it's obviously nonsense, as only the most crazed conspiracy theorist would surmise the Jack the ripper is responsible for all crime in the 19th century, and if the latter, then there has to be a way to rewrite it to remove any ambiguity. I don't get the impression from reading the police-reports that they had trouble telling who was a Ripper victim and who was not because they were deluged with the bodies of dead women. It's difficult to tell because the series of murders all shared some similarities, yet they all had subtle (and not so subtle) differences, and no two "witnesses" (in the sense that they saw a man would could have been Jack The Ripper) give exactly the same description (though some agree more than others). When a killer is unknown, any opinion as to the extent of his crimes is, to a large extent, conjecture. The only way to truly know how many the Ripper killed would have been to catch him and extract a truthful confession. That this was not done is the "major difficulty in identifying who was and was not a Ripper victim". If you want to rewrite it to say that there were many crimes with a similar MO around the same time, and so it's difficult to pin any of the crimes on one killer or killers, that would be acceptable. Martin 15:57, 5 May 2007 (UTC)

Ripper location article nominated for deletion

Loading my watchlist today, I find that Dorset Street, London has been nominated for deletion. As the articles for the other four locations are of similar length and content, I fear they too may be nominated next. If you think these articles are worthwhile parts of this project, please assist in improving them (particularly Dorset Street, as it's in immediate danger), and participate in the deletion discussion. MattHucke^(t) 21:50, 1 September 2007 (UTC)

The Whitechapel Murders

Should we put all the murders that the contempory police force listed as 'The Whitechapel Murders' in one list? At the moment they are all mixed up with some very dubious and even imaginary (Fairy Fay) victims. Colin4C 12:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)

We've had this discussion before. Your desire to completely rewrite the section to not fous on the canonical five was attempted before and rejected. Please get approval here before doing something you know goes against long-standing consensus. 71.203.223.65 15:07, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Citations

I've supplied some references as per wikipedia guidelines. More to come. Colin4C 10:08, 20 October 2007 (UTC)

Blind revert

An editor recently blind reverted my changes with no comment other than that they were not discussed... to the contrary, they have been discussed on these pages time and time again:

• restoring "or killers," which has been long supported, because we do not know how many killers there are and of all the alleged Rippe victims listed all authorities say that at least some of them were by a second killer
• removing a link to Ripperologists, which was an article that was not even named correctly and was only a dicdef, against Wikipedia policies
• putting the WVC info ahead of modern research so that the whole section followed proper chronology
• removing a trivial and nonencyclopedic minor stupid fictional reference that is already covered on the Ripper fiction article

I have restored my edits to remove the recent edits that had no place here and to return those sections to the long standing consensus-approved wording. Other recent changes that were valuable and encyclopedic remained untouched. By blind reverting me and saying I needed to discuss the changes, the editor in question missed completely that the changes I undid were not discussed in the first place. New changes that are contentious should be discussed and approved before they are put in, not the other way around. 71.203.223.65 15:16, 20 October 2007 (UTC)