The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
Keep If this case had been routine, it would not have been receiving the sustained national
[1] and international
[2] coverage that it has been getting, per
WP:GEOSCOPE. There has been
WP:DEPTH of coverage in this case, partly due to the fact that the event occurred in the same time and place as the events surrounding the
killing of Gabby Petito, leading to considerable speculation about who the perpetrator/s might be. By all accounts, the event was highly unusual for the location in which it happened.
StonyBrook (
talk)
17:06, 2 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Those are passing coverage (classic
WP:PRIMARYNEWS), and any sustained coverage in this case is routine coverage of the stages of a crime investigation.
WP:DEPTH specifically discourages using articles like the Independent one (and the vast majority of possible sources for this event), noting similarities/contrasts to a notable event, as evidence of notability. The event warrants a paragraph in the Petito article, nothing more.
Star Garnet (
talk)
18:41, 2 February 2022 (UTC)reply
I've read the policies that you link to, but I don't specifically see parts that back up what you are arguing. And I do see where the event meets the general notability requirements. I'm open to being persuaded, but you've not persuaded me. Can you really specifically point out where this should not be on wikipedia, rather than linking to a policy, spell out the parts that you think apply? Until then, I remain unpersuaded.
CT55555 (
talk)
13:05, 3 February 2022 (UTC)reply
On a world-scale, the media covers thousands of murders/killings/unnatural deaths at a high level of detail annually. It is not WP's place to compile that information, or even the few hundred that were covered most closely. Wikinews, sure. The four articles I nominated for deletion after browsing through the 30-odd 2021 murder/killing/death of X articles fall short of the others in level of news analysis and impact on outside events (I'm also skeptical of plenty of the others, but I could at least see a competent argument for them meeting at least one of the
WP:EVENTCRITERIA). While they certainly received signicant coverage in the media, that is in the form of news reports. We don't have the secondary sources to satisfy SIGCOV. Could this incident gain notability through a book, law, or otherwise? Sure, in the way that some of today's paintings may get articles in 40 years. But until they have gained that secondary coverage, these are
WP:NOTMEMORIAL material. Specific to this case,
WP:DEPTH states that "Media sources sometimes report on events because of their similarity (or contrast, or comparison) to another widely reported incident. Editors should not rely on such sources to afford notability to the new event, since the main purpose of such articles is to highlight either the old event or such types of events generally."
Star Garnet (
talk)
16:28, 3 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Thanks, I appreciate this context. I don't want to make a hasty comment, so I'll reflect on this. May I just ask one other question of you, I see AfD described a some sort of last resort whereby we should try to improve articles before deleting them. Would you say that you or anyone has done that with these four examples?
CT55555 (
talk)
16:35, 3 February 2022 (UTC)reply
No problem, I should have made a clearer case in the original nomination. While I didn't edit the article (which I did for several of the other pages that I didn't nominate), I did search for sources that could help satisfy SIGCOV, and came up empty.
Star Garnet (
talk)
17:12, 3 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Putting aside whether or not the 'significant coverage' that the event received qualifies as SIGCOV (the sources are reliable but not secondary), I would suggest you look at
WP:EVENTCRITERIA. Particularly this paragraph: "Editors should bear in mind recentism, the tendency for new and current matters to seem more important than they might seem in a few years time. Many events receive coverage in the news and yet are not of historic or lasting importance. News organizations have criteria for content, i.e. news values, that differ from the criteria used by Wikipedia and encyclopedias. A violent crime, accidental death, or other media events may be interesting enough to reporters and news editors to justify coverage, but this will not always translate into sufficient notability for a Wikipedia article."
Star Garnet (
talk)
22:58, 3 February 2022 (UTC)reply
Keep. This double murder has been linked by the media to the
Killing of Gabby Petito because they occurred within days of each other and in the same vicinity. Both cases also involved the same police department. However, the media speculation connecting the two cases was not substantiated. If one is to consider other possibilities, such as merging with another article then the
Killing of Gabby Petito would be a candidate merger option, even though it is not connected. Keeping this as a separate article in some ways protects other articles from inappropriate addition of content. There is enough coverage, worldwide, simply because of the coincidence in space and time for it not to be a "routine" murder or "routine" coverage. -
Cameron Dewe (
talk)
08:47, 4 February 2022 (UTC)reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's
talk page or in a
deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.