Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of massacres

List of massacres

List of massacres (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)

Currently the page list of massacres is protected due to protracted edit wars. There have been meaningful discussions about how the introduction to the page could be altered so that only entries supported by reliable third party sources were used. But the problem is that the word massacre has no agreed definition that can be attached to a category of offences and it is used in a by third party sources in an arbitrary way. One incident may be described as a massacre in a third party source, while another very similar incident is not.

A requested move to "List of mass killings" failed less than a month ago because, AFAICT, the list would be very large and most thought it even more of a vague title and open to more WP:POV interpretations than the current name. This is also considered to be a problem with all the other names to date that have been suggested.

There are some sections of the article that can be salvaged and placed into new articles which are not contentious, two such articles already exist List of school-related attacks and Going postal, and the two sub-lists from this article that could be salvaged are "massacres during labour conflicts", and "Criminal and non-political massacres". Much of the rest of the article are either covered in other articles eg "State-sponsored genocides" are covered much better in the Genocide article, or are just an arbitrary collection of events which editors with various POVs have added to the article. For example the air forces of the belligerents in World War II launched scores and scores of strategic and tactical bomber raids every week of the war many of which which killed scores of people, yet the list of raids classified as massacres runs to four with no reason given as to why those four are selected as the only four raids that were massacres.

This leads to one final point. The list is as it is currently structured is far from complete, for example if all aerial bombardments from all wars that result deaths are included then it will many times larger and it is already has an edit size of 196K . Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 13:19, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• Note: This debate has been included in the list of Military-related deletions. —FayssalF - ^{Wiki me up®} 16:16, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

• Weak delete: the page as it is now tries to include ever large scale killing and this will make the article unusable and unmaintainable, just because of the number of such events. The current structuring uses recent media jargon with the "state sponsored massacre". Most of the {{fact}} requests were applied mechanically - where the relevant article exists the references and details should not get duplicated over several places. Whole wars (e.g. Spanish Civil War) were inserted into the list.

If the contents is kept it should be broken into parts: first geographically by continent or subcontinent, then by date, without attaching further labels as war, state or religion. School shooting, workplace violence and gang wars should be separated into standalone lists. Pavel Vozenilek (talk) 21:07, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

Why by continent? You say without attaching further labels to war, state or religion, but then immediately suggest that schools, workplace and gang wars should be labelled. Why those three and not others? Have you read the talk page? Because it is suggested that the current introduction should be replaced with a new one, and only massacres described as such will be included in the list in future if it survives this AFD --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 00:28, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete for the reasons stated by the proposer who provides a good summary of the problems with the article. I also think that "non-political" massacres such as the recent school shootings in Finland and Westroads Mall massacre can be compiled with a wide consensus. (Sarah777 (talk) 21:12, 8 December 2007 (UTC))

• Keep: there are no rules against incomplete lists. This one is also useful. --Quoth nevermore (talk) 00:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

  "Quoth nevermore" what is a massacre? --Philip Baird Shearer (talk) 00:19, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete. First define Massacre (WP:OR). Second, how long into history will we go back. Third, even if we go back in history only 300 years, there are so many massacres that this list will never be completed, and won't be helpful. Malinaccier (talk • contribs) 00:52, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Delete, as much as I hate to say it. This is an indiscriminate and unmanageable list. The information on its own is helpful, but not in a format like this. Splitting into smaller, much more focused and well-sourced articles (a lot of which already exist) is much more meaningful and less arbitrary. --Czj (talk) 01:04, 9 December 2007 (UTC)