Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of victims of the Our Lady of the Angels school fire

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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.

The result was merge to Our Lady of the Angels School fire. There is clear consensus here that this should not exist as a stand-alone article. Opinion is, however, split on whether to merge or just delete. In general, WP:PRESERVE is always a good thing, so I'm going with merge. It's entirely up to whoever executes the merge to figure out which, and how much, material is worth merging. Even among the people arguing to merge, there is some feeling that a selective merge is called for.

Also, even among the people arguing to merge, there is a substantial feeling that a merge should be followed by a delete (i.e. no redirect left behind). Whoever does the merge, if you decide to go that route, please see Wikipedia:Merge and delete to ensure that what we end up with fully complies with our attribution requirements. I suspect the best way to comply would be to leave the redirect, but in view of the discussion here, I'm not going to require that. -- RoySmith (talk) 01:05, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

List of victims of the Our Lady of the Angels school fire[edit]

List of victims of the Our Lady of the Angels school fire (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)
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This is a list of non-notable people. They have suffered a tragedy but Wikipeida is not a memorial or obituary. When it comes to other articles listing victims of events, they generally only list notable people who have or can potentially have separate articles dedicated to each of them for highlights that are not merely tied to their death. LjL (talk) 19:33, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This debate has been included in the list of People-related deletion discussions. LjL (talk) 19:35, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. LjL (talk) 19:35, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Schools-related deletion discussions. LjL (talk) 19:35, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Crime-related deletion discussions. LjL (talk) 19:35, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This debate has been included in the list of Illinois-related deletion discussions. LjL (talk) 19:35, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. It's not just a "list of victims", it's an analysis of a disaster. Anmccaff (talk) 19:53, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep - analysis of a disaster. good article in my opinion, it doesnt need to be deleted. it forfills its purpose.--BabbaQ (talk) 20:28, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Surely, the "analysis of the disaster" should be on the parent article, Our Lady of the Angels School fire, not on an article supposedly about its victims (which does list every victim by name, and explicitly calls itself a "list")? LjL (talk) 21:01, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge to Our Lady of the Angels school fire: with its details, but not the common students, unless they have special details related to the event. The room details are relevant to understanding the fire, but aren't notable enough for a separate article. And there's nothing particularly educational about the names of children whose roles do not stand out; it would be relevant mostly to genealogists, and is documented on other websites. See WP:SINGLEEVENT and section following it for the guidelines. --Closeapple (talk) 02:37, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the names do add to the narrative, although I have to say I'm normally in favor of pretending the bytes are ink. Anmccaff (talk) 02:48, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment: How about putting all of the victims' names in a collapsible list or shell that users can choose to expand if they so choose? Something like Template:Collapsible list or Template:CollapsedShell could probably do well with this. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 04:14, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would probably argue for only listing the people killed in the school fire and only list the number of people injured, unless the person was injured so badly that they received special coverage outside of the others (ie, some place that isn't a list). Listing someone who only had a scraped knee is a little bit indiscriminate, in my opinion. I also have to say that things need to be very carefully stated and maybe even omitted, as in the case of Kathryn Harte. The article says that she was rolled, which may or may not have caused a cerebral aneurysm that popped years later. Harte is dead and the teacher likely is as well, but that's got to run afoul of some sort of issue with verification given that the only claim to substantiate this is a statement from a family member on a memorial website. I'd highly recommend not using anything based on secondhand information of that nature. I also need to add that the claims that she was rolled down the stairs by a teacher doesn't seem to be explicitly backed up by the memorial site either, since she said that she believed it was a fellow student. Now that I look further at the sourcing for the page, it looks like this is predominantly sourced with the memorial page. The about page gives some information, but I am somewhat uncomfortable with this being pretty much entirely taken from this website. It's maintained by one person, I know that the school itself links to the page, and he's taken things from this book, but I'd just prefer that if we are going to have this on here, that it's based on far stronger sourcing than just this one website - especially given the nature of at least one of the claims. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 09:51, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • OK, it is listed here as being fairly good, but I still have to express some concern over including the injured people and including claims over who rolled Harte. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 09:53, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Merge summary information and analysis into the main article, and then delete. Wikipedia is not a memorial site, and we should not try to turn it into one. These spin-off lists of victims are in effect content forks of their main articles. -- The Anome (talk) 23:25, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Agree about the content fork, or at least about the risk of it. It is a Bad Thing to have two articles cover the same ground. Anmccaff (talk) 23:31, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete Wikipedia is not a memorial site.Also, it is most inappropriate to list the names and ages of victims who merely skinned a knee. Any analysis of the progress of the tragedy should be included in the main article about the fire. Edison (talk) 23:54, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If content found here belongs in the main article, surely that should be Merge the good and Delete the dross. Anmccaff (talk) 00:02, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's true in general, but in this case, why it's not encyclopedic has been described at length (in this and related AfDs) as part of other comments. LjL (talk) 16:46, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Selective merge and Delete. We already have an article on the fire itself. No need whatsoever for a list of victims. -- Necrothesp (talk) 10:33, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delete The article Casualties of the September 11 attacks is similar and has attracted more discussion. In that article, people who died are categorized and grouped together in different ways but presented as numbers rather than names. The list of names in this article without context does not provide encyclopedic information which informs - the names are just sorts of data that give no context into this event. I think it would show more respect to communicate the right amount of information to make the reader understand the event. This is not an art project like a memorial, although I do wish this article could link to lists of names for the people who want to find that through this encyclopedic summary.
I could change my opinion about this but these are my initial thoughts. Blue Rasberry (talk) 23:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Clearly, Wikipedia needs to have a policy debate about listing the people killed in major news events with enduring notability.E.M.Gregory (talk) 16:35, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In fact, the comment just above yours explains that such a debate has already been had about the 9/11 attacks, and it resulted in the decision to not list the victims, and in a policy reflecting such at WP:NOTMEMORIAL. LjL (talk) 18:25, 18 December 2015 (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.
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