User talk:Sydneykrieger

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Hello, Sydneykrieger, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with Wiki Education; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 20:02, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Notes

Hi - I have some notes for you:

This needs editing for tone and style. For example, the article should not have "why did he do it sections", as this doesn't fit Wikipedia's formal style. Right now it's very choppy. Here's how I would format this:

Potential links between cases

General information (ie, the sentence "Given the short time frame and similarities between the cases, specifically the small geographic region where they occurred and the age and gender of the victims, it is often wondered whether the cases are linked.")

Route 29 Stalker

This would cover the police profile and any information that they have put forward about this theory. To some extent information or theories posed in popular media (newspapers, etc) can be used, but it should be limited to reliable sources - forum posts, wikis, and the like should not be used.

Suspects

This section would list the potential suspects and the arguments reliable sources have given for or against their guilt. If the suspect has an article, there's no need to go into any specific detail about their crimes unless they pertain to arguing for or against them being the Route 29 Stalker.

There's also no need to list the reasons as to why someone would become a serial killer, as there's already an article about that. At most there could be information about what police and reliable sources have stated about why Route 29 may have been chosen, but use caution with this and make sure that you are only summarizing what has been explicitly stated in the source material. I would also make this a separate section from the serial killer theory, possibly including it in a section that gives a very brief overview of Route 29.

Finally, I noted some issues with the sourcing. The first is that while you list Richard Evonitz as a suspect, the sourcing used to back this up is iffy. Here's why: ultimately you only have one usable source that mentions him in relation to the Route 29 Stalker and the article puts more emphasis on the parents who made the claim believing that he murdered their daughter rather than them saying that he's the Route 29 Stalker per se. The other one is a self-published blog post on Medium, which would not be seen as a reliable source in general, but especially for a topic like this. The only other source that is about Evonitz is Murderpedia, which is a problematic source in this situation since it doesn't make any mention of him being the Route 29 Stalker. As such, it would be original research to use this to source claims that he could be the stalker. You also don't want to put too much undue weight on Evonitz, if there isn't a lot of sourcing that discusses him in connection with the theory - the coverage in the section should be proportional to the amount of coverage. What you need for sourcing is content that very specifically deals with the Route 29 Stalker theory.

I hope this helps! Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:24, 6 March 2020 (UTC)