User talk:Dru of Id/Archives/2011/May

Death row listings

A simple murder, at least in the US, may not qualify as a notable event, victim, or perpetrator. There are just too many robberies gone bad and domestic disputes with a gun or knife handy. This means that being on death row does not provide automatic notability, when the coverage of the event is judged against WP:NOTNEWS. If there is to be a list, to satisfy WP:BLP, I agree that semiprotection is essential, to keep vandals from adding someone they don't like. A list of 3000 plus will be very fluid, as people get executed, die of natural causes, get a new trial or get sentences commuted. Since people regularly stay on death row 15 or 20 years, a newspaper article stating they were convicted and sentenced is not satisfactory, since it does not say they are still on death row 15 years later, and since many such articles will go stale and become deadlinks. Then if we remove the name, the list becomes incomplete and defective. A listing of "A tiny percentage of the people on death row" is silly and unencyclopedic on the face of it. And if being on death row has a presumption of inherent notability, then as I argued in the AFD, every person ever executed or ever on death row but escaped, died, was pardoned, had sentence commuted, or escaped is equally entitled to be in a list of "Persons formerly on death rows," since notability is not temporary. I see it as quite unmaintainable, in general. It is a directory of notable and nonnotable persons known only for one thing, which some editors really like a lot. Unfortunately, few of them have any inclination to work on the article. You have improved it by some referencing. Linkage to up-to-date individual state listings of those on death row is the only hope to have an encyclopedic article. References to someone's or some group's website which lists death row prisoners is very dubious. Making a complete list and keeping it up to date is not something I am prepared to work on, since it is a huge project and I don't think it belongs in the encyclopedia at all. Kudos to you for improving the article. Edison (talk) 00:08, 3 May 2011 (UTC)